Tuesday, September 22, 2009
This week, the World Stem Cell Summit was in Baltimore and on Monday I was invited to check out the poster forum and to hear the opening lectures on Stem Cell Medicine.
In the poster forum area, every poster was an ambassador who could speak to the specific research in detail, or in my case,...
yeah, cancer is a concern- i would guess 2 other concerns are immune/rejection reactions and new viruses- this is obviously a very promising field, but i agree with the wisdom of cautious advancement- that is, unless guinea pigs really do turn out to be good models for human metabolism
That was the excitement about the red blood cell discovery! With that discovery they feel they can make transplants and blood transfusions safer from immune/rejection.
We still have a problem in that the Dickey-Wicker amendment prohibits any labs using federal dollars to create new embryonic stem cell lines. Most labs rely on federal dollars! The ban that Obama lifted did nothing to change that. For example, being able to know if the induced pluripotent stem cells can truly recreate embryonic stem cells can not be done in the country! Those labs have to send it somewhere else and they potentially loose some of their desired standards.