Fetal tissue heals burns

They've got a real culture of life in Switzerland. They're using cells from aborted fetuses to spare burned children the agony of skin grafts and scarring:

Fetal Tissue Heals Burns

An experimental therapy that uses skin cells grown from an aborted fetus successfully healed severe burns in eight children, sparing them the need for skin grafts, according to a study published today.

The treatment led to the regrowth of essentially normal skin on second- and third-degree burns in about two weeks, according to the report by a Swiss research team. The scarring and tissue contraction seen after many burns did not occur, and dressing changes were easier and less painful, the researchers said.

The fetal tissue promotes growth of the patient's own skin cells rather than becoming incorporated into the recipient's skin as a true "graft." Further, it appears that a piece of fetal skin smaller than a postage stamp could be used to produce enough cells to treat hundreds of patients.

"The results were sort of unexpected. . . . These constructs seem to work as a biological Band-Aid, promoting spontaneous healing of the patient," said Patrick Hohlfeld of University Hospital of Lausanne, who was one of the researchers.

The study will appear in a future edition of the Lancet and was published online today. [...] [WaPo]

Would this kind of research be allowed in the United States? Could it be eligible for federal funding?

Comments

[speedbudget]

This is just...awesome. Science is way cool. To answer your question: are you kidding? Our gubment gets all squeamish, acting like a bunch of cells are a living, sentient being. There's no way on EARTH they would allow this to happen. Meanwhile, people will continue to suffer and die needlessly from burns. Not to mention, if a person survives, the scarring and inability to control body temp, etc. But, God forbid we help a few living people.

[stork@storkyak.com]

The research is certainly legal in the United States, it is simply something that the government does not pay for. Clearly if saving children from burns is so important, don't you think there would be a market for it?

The question that I have is, for anyone advocating tissue research on aborted fetuses, what happens when demand outstrips present supply? Should we compel women to become impregnated and have abortions?

An excellent source of women for fetal harvesting is our prisons. Women in prison have no rights and it ought to be decent restitution to impregnate them and then use their offspring for research purposes. While we are it, why not experiment on the prisoners themselves?

Finally, if we can and do redistribute a person's property and wealth, have the government take money from some people to give to someone else, then, why not require redistribution of reproduction? Since most people work until June to pay their taxes, or six months out of every year, would it be really that wrong for the government to lay claim to a woman's body for 9 months in exchange for a 9 month tax holiday? Or maybe any woman that receives more in government aid than she pays in taxes, say, any single woman that has a lot of student loans and isn't producing babies, should be required to knock out a fetus for Uncle Sam.

We haven't even gotten to the demand made potentially by stem cell consumer products. I want my stem cell skin jacket, my stem cell bone grill tools, my stem cell hair restoration piece, my stem cell penis extension.

Time to start humpin, Cindy, all your kids are dead!

:-)

[stork@storkyak.com]

Wow, just imagine, when stem cells finally make into consumer products, I'll be able to specify on the order site if I want my stem cell skin lamp shade and stem cell bone grill tools to be made from jewish stem cells only. In a future not even 100 years after World War II, young women of all races will be volunteering to make consumer products that we thought unimaginable. Why shouldn't the USA try to take over the world. We're Nazis every other way, and we may as well just go all out.

[speedbudget]

Stork--did you actually read the article? This is what drives me nuts about the conservatives; it seems you guys hardly ever actually read and absorb anything. Let me quote for you:

"Further, it appears that a piece of fetal skin smaller than a postage stamp could be used to produce enough cells to treat hundreds of patients."

There is no need to start going into the _Handmaid's Tale_. I'm sure that, soon, a small skin-tag will be all that's needed to treat 100s of patients. With that, if only one woman a year got an abortion, there would still be more than enough fetal tissue to go around.

And where is all this gnashing of teeth when it comes to fertility clinics? Those place make fertilized eggs (in conservative parlance: babies) by the thousands, then FREEZE them for a few years (ouch!) then THROW THEM OUT. Literally. Yet, there is no protesting outside of fertility clinics.

If conservatives are so "pro-life," why are they so against alleviating the pain and suffering of those of us who are here and sentient? With working nervous systems and consciousness and everything? And why is there nary a whimper about the fertilized eggs getting tossed until somebody says, "Gee, what a waste. We could use this material to really help humanity." The hypocrisy...it hurts my head.

[flyinfur]

Impossible to get funding. And it would be almost impossible to do at any university (where a lot of research in the states is done), partly because it would be difficult to get the research approved through oversight boards, and partly because it would be discouraged by schools afraid of bad press.

One of my colleagues is trying to do a study with cinnamon (yes, the spice) and it's taken MONTHS to get approval for that!

[mudkitty]

If mymemory serves me, I believe Bush Sr. banned research on fetal tissue and Clinton didn't have the juice to overturn the ban. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

[almostinfamous]

speedbudget, have you watched american dad?

in one episode, the dad says "we're conservative. that means the only way we dont like killing things is that way" referring to abortion.

i find that to hold true in the vast majority of the cases

[speedbudget]

No, I haven't watched American Dad. I like the Simpsons.

But I must say, my conservative father, who thinks that all this "take away freedoms so we can be more free" thing Bushie is doing is great, and who also, by the way, thinks the ACLU is a "bunch of nit-wits who only want to protect the rights of criminals" (yes, I'm embarassed to say, my Dad sees nothing wrong with doing away with the 4th Amendment completely) my conservative father, thinks that a woman's right to self-determination and whether or not she incubates a parasite is so undeniable that he won't even enter a discussion of it. He thinks it's ridiculous that anybody even questions a woman's right to choose to do whatever she wants with her own body. Which is hard for me to reconcile with his view that our homes should not be free from search...He also thinks that we should do stem-cell research and I'm sure he would support this research. Does that make him a non-conservative? Do I need to burst his bubble? I would love that...

[stork]

First off, I'm actually in favor of stem cell research simply because I think the government owes it to the veterans. It is right for Americans to kill some of the people in third world in order to civilize the rest of them, and it is right for those Americans that kill or be killed to expect that their government will kill as necessary to heal their wounds. A fetus is less important than a soldier, as it were. It's all about choosing what lives and who dies, that's just life and that's what governments do.

I did read the article. I think the doctor in the article is being both idealistic and stupid. Harvesting enough for 8 kids is not mass production. It simply has not been done. And, it might ultimately wind up being cheaper to harvest a fetus into multiple products the way we harvest cows. And, he pays no understanding to what consumers want.

The bottom line is that fetal tissue research turns fetuses into marketable commodities, and as such, they play by market rules. It is obvious that there will be a great many products made possible by research of this kind. Every animal product that we used today could be replaced by a human equivalent. It will be a competitive field, create a massive industry, and people will demand fetuses in all sorts of varieties. Those ethnicities or genetic lines that are rarer will have a higher premium on their abortion products. Some ethnicities might actually be literally incented to drive themselves to extinction in order to keep up with consumer demand. We have 300,000 different kind of food products produced each year, and there is no doubt that we would have hundreds of thousands of stem cell products!

[stork]

Oh, everyone kills in our society. Liberals with all their handwringing about "their bodies and pregancy as a parasite" are, at the end of the day, terminating another potential life so that they can cash in (or, more correctly put, finish their degree, find the right man, whatever, it's all a sort of a greed). And Liberals kill whenever they stand up for convicted criminals, whenever they oppose the death penalty for those criminals like sex offenders whose recindence rate is well documented, and they kill whenever they place the welfare of another animal or species above that of mankind. And Liberals have had their wars.

Conservative for all their love of jesus kill a lot too. They kill the weak or the unlucky by supporting consumer use of technologies that are dangerous, such as private ownership of guns or fast cars or by opposing DUI legislation. They kill currently in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they kill by supporting an economic system which, while producing greater wealth, also produces greater stress on people, leading to heart disease, etc.

Bottom line is, unless you are a pro-life peacenik opposed to the death penalty but trample mother nature whenever it hurts humans, you favor killing of some kind. The rest of us, well, are killers and so for liberals to say Bush is murderer or conservatives to say abortion doctors killers is so much children hanging around an empty cookie jar yelling at each other for them. The so-called moral high ground by either side is a bunch of crap. We all live like the apes that we are.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Human bodies have been marketable commodities for as long as we've had organ transplants--but we haven't witnessed massive organ-harvesting genocide since 1962.

[speedbudget]

Thank you for a voice of reason, Lindsay. I think this guy is just bringing up red herrings, but still. I don't have the eloquence or broad knowledge you do, and I was feeling out of my depth.

[Ginger Yellow]

"Liberals kill whenever they stand up for convicted criminals, whenever they oppose the death penalty for those criminals like sex offenders..."

That's some logic you got there.

[stork]

Lindsay, organ harvesting is complicated, expensive, and potentially life threatening to donors. Cranking out fetuses for harvest is both safe and cheap.

Speedbudget, it's a mathematical problem. If someone kills or rapes, and has a 70% chance of doing so again, then, the death penalty would theoretically save thousands of lives overall. Of course I'm pulling numbers out of my rear, but a real and reasoned study about the death penalty would at least include a monte carlo simulation that was built out of the odds and costs of a violent criminal committing another violent crime, and then weighing that versus the social costs of the state killing a potentially innocent man.

People forget that in our day age that the primary job of government is still to decide who lives and who dies, and thus we elect governments that muddle that decision in favor of more capricious arguments about rain forests and bibles in public schools.

[speedbudget]

When did this become a death penalty discussion?

[Bill]

Stork, you're so right and well-reasoned in your posts. If it isn't obvious to people that a 14-wk old fetus is the moral equivalent of a Jew in the Holocaust, those people are Nazis. Dance, monkey, dance for papa.

[Hippodameia]

It's nice to know that the conservatives won't let even critically injured children stand in the way of the quest to wipe out reproductive choice.

[Uncle Kvetch]

If someone kills or rapes, and has a 70% chance of doing so again, then, the death penalty would theoretically save thousands of lives overall.

So would a life sentence...and that would actually mean one less death.

Of course I'm pulling numbers out of my rear

You don't say.

but a real and reasoned study about the death penalty would at least include a monte carlo simulation

Just as no discussion of national security policy vis-a-vis the Middle East is complete without a comparison to Space Invaders.

What the hell are you on, Stork? Is it legal? I want me some.

[Barbar]

a real and reasoned study about the death penalty would at least include a monte carlo simulation that was built out of the odds and costs of a violent criminal committing another violent crime, and then weighing that versus the social costs of the state killing a potentially innocent man.

You should patent this idea before someone steals it.

Cranking out fetuses for harvest is both safe and cheap.

Are you insane?

But nevertheless, your overall argument is sound. On one hand, every day a woman doesn't get pregnant, she is "murdering" the potential child she would have had if she did; and every day that a bomb blows up and kills people, they are "murdered" in some sense. People on both sides like to play games to get the high moral high ground, but in reality there is death all around us, it just depends on what kind of death you like.

Thanks for keeping us grounded, stork.

[R. Mildred]

But nevertheless, your overall argument is sound. On one hand, every day a woman doesn't get pregnant, she is "murdering" the potential child she would have had if she did

Every period you mean.

On a real note, pro-lifers have told me about how swedish women already get pregnant and abort precisly so they can sell their fetus to medical research (presumably for cash) which I think you'll find totally backs up Stork's argument.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

In the US it's already a federal crime to sell fetuses or fetal tissues.

Don't know what the law is in Sweden but the "Swedish women getting pregnant just to sell their aborted fetuses" sounds straight out of urban legend.

[matey]

Is it, blastocyst to fetus, really a potential life? I mean the thing is living and growing, so it's life, Yay or Nay? I say Yay, mmm-kay.

Since abortion is already legal, why don't we take advantage of what we have? It might be a good way to treat meth makers when their labs blow-up and they get burned(check out Newsweek's Aug.8 issue).

[hilzoy]

It is presently legal for a parent to give up his or her (minor) child's body for organ donation, so long as no money is involved, the child is not killed for the purpose, and various other safeguards meant to ensure that this is just about parents whose kid died saying "yes, you can use his or her organs to save someone else's life". These safeguards work quite well.

Is anyone not OK with that?

OK then: it is presently also legal to do the same thing with one's aborted or miscarried fetus, subject to the same restrictions. In particular, the fetus cannot be killed for the sake of its tissue, nor can the doctor who does the abortion or the woman who has it receive any compensation. It's exactly like the situation with transplanting the organs of dead children. Exactly.

[speedbudget]

"It is estimated that up to 50% of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously"

Sounds like "potential life" is going a bit far; with a 50/50 chance at survival to begin with, I don't think a woman choosing to end her pregnancy is any big deal, potential-life wise.

As for Swedish women selling their fetuses, Wikipedia has a page on abortion in Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Sweden
(Sorry, don't know how to do a link). Their laws sound much more strict than ours do, what with requiring a special investigation if the abortion occurs after 12 weeks.

A quick search for anything dealing with Swedish women selling aborted fetuses ends up with...nothing.

[R. Mildred]

Don't know what the law is in Sweden but the "Swedish women getting pregnant just to sell their aborted fetuses" sounds straight out of urban legend.

Oh I'm sure it is, like women getting pregnant just for the child support, it totally fails to take into account the rather hit or miss affair that is getting pregnant and requires a certain ignorance of what actually getting an abortion is like.

But as a pro-life strawmen it hits all the buttons a culture warrior could ever want, evoking images of Dr mengela type decadent eurodoctors, massacring babies by the basket full for their precious stemcells.

I felt the satire troll deserved a strawman of such high quality for "People forget that in our day age that the primary job of government is still to decide who lives and who dies" which made me laugh