Saturday, December 04, 2004

Stem cells and fat

A friend of mine wrote to me yesterday about someone she met who is going through hoops trying to arrange for surgery for a family member. The surgery involves embryonic stem cells and is being done out of the country. Here is part of the the text of my reply:

What’s interesting to me is how little attention is paid to stem cells that don’t come from embryos. Stem cells from fat can do the same things as those from fetal tissue. Even if we take away complex issues like would you sacrifice your own unborn child to let someone else’s child heal some from an accident the simple fact is that fat cells are much easier to harvest and much more abundant than embryonic cells.

Just think you probably could have given this fellow much more material to work with than you get from the average embryo. I certainly could. I could donate pounds of the stuff.

So why is it that nobody talks about it? Why is there so little attention paid? Why is California very publicly giving tons of money to controversial fetal research when the same money could be spent with no legal or ethical questions and get the same results?

I looked into this subject when I first started dating Dan and learned that his form of MDA was caused by the anterior horn cells in his CNS. Stem cell research looks like it might be able to help people with SMA. As I said I have plenty of fat cells to donate so we had a pact that when the time came I would be the donor. He ran out of time before the research was ready for him.

But I have to ask. If the average person didn’t think “dead baby” when they heard the words stem cell research then how much more money and time would we as a country have put towards this research? And why, , why does the average person automatically think of embryos? It’s gotten so it’s not even specified most of the time. It’s just assumed.

Wouldn’t it be grand if the fellow with the bike knew about the fat stem cell research and got involved in a program here in our country?

For more about this subject just google the words “fat stem cell.”


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