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The decision to offer New York women up to $10,000 to donate their eggs for stem cell research, payable by taxpayers, is "incredibly irresponsible and immoral," critics told FOXNews.com. New York's decision to offer women in the state up to $10,000 to donate their eggs for stem cell research, payable by taxpayers, is "incredibly irresponsible and immoral," critics told FOXNews.com. Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said the move -- the first of its kind nationwide -- treats women as "commodities, almost like cows" and could lead to cash-strapped women in other states to partake in similar programs....

Technical feat shows that the different route to stem cells can indeed make a full mammal body. Two teams of Chinese researchers have created live mice from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, answering a lingering question about the developmental potential of the cells. Since Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan created the first iPS cells1 in 2006, researchers have wondered whether they could generate an entire mammalian body from iPS cells, as they have from true embryonic stem cells. Experiments reported online this week in Nature 2 and in Cell Stem Cell 3 suggest that, at least for mice,...

Bioethics: The former director of the National Institutes of Health, once an enthusiast for embryonic stem cells, now says their future has "dimmed." So why is the administration bailing out research into such therapies while troubled states like California have committed billions?Aside from creating or saving a few research jobs, the administration's decision to federally fund embryonic stem cell research is, as we've noted, a bailout of bad science. It throws money at an avenue of research that time and adult stem cell progress have passed by. Applauding the administration's move was Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who echoed the claims...

In a proof-of-concept study, Mayo Clinic investigators have demonstrated that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be used to treat heart disease. iPS cells are stem cells converted from adult cells. In this study, the researchers reprogrammed ordinary fibroblasts, cells that contribute to scars such as those resulting from a heart attack, converting them into stem cells that fix heart damage caused by infarction. The findings appear in the current online issue of the journal Circulation. "This study establishes the real potential for using iPS cells in cardiac treatment," says Timothy Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., first author on the Mayo Clinic...

“The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” — Langman’s Medical Embryology, 7th edition, 1995 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For people who advocate the killing of embryonic human beings in the cause of biomedical research, the Holy Grail is an argument that would definitively establish that the human embryo, at least early in its development, is not a living human organism and therefore not a human being at all. The problem for these advocates is that all...

Less than two years ago, it looked like the ethical debate over human embryonic stem cells might be coming to an end. In November 2007, two research groups, one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and another at Kyoto University in Japan, announced that they had succeeded in directly reprogramming human skin cells into stem cells. Earlier this year, Canadian and British researchers reported even better news. They have developed a new way to create such cells without using viruses, which pose a risk of producing tumors by damaging the transformed cells' genes. Yesterday, as many as 700 new stem cell...

Look to the retina as a likely site for the first success in stem-cell therapy. "The eye is the best place to test proof-of-concept for stem cell-based therapies," says Martin Friedlander of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Friedlander is co-founder of EyeCyte, also in La Jolla, whose investors include industry heavyweight Pfizer. Several laboratories are exploring stem-cell-derived transplants to delay or prevent blindness, and Pfizer recently put up funds for a project nearing human trials at University College London (UCL). Why the eye appeal? As organs go, it is easily accessible, somewhat protected from the immune system's...

Pirates can now trade in their peg-legs for real legs as scientists transform wood into bone.In a Royal Society of Chemistry journal Italian chemists show that ordinary wood can be turned into bone suitable for repairing damaged limbs.It brings a whole new meaning to the term "tree surgery".The microstructure of the wood is the perfect natural template for making bone as it allows growth of blood vessels and tissues, Anna Tampieri and colleagues report in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.By treating wood with a fairly simple set of chemical processes, the natural structure of the wood is retained.The wood is...

Enlarge ImageOn track. Colonies of genetically corrected cells taken from Fanconi anemia patients show red and yellow, markers associated with pluripotency. Credit: Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte Two papers published this week appear to bring closer the day when embryonic-like stem cells can be used to treat human diseases. One study describes what scientists say is the safest method yet to produce these cells. The other reports success in using the cells to begin correcting a rare genetic disorder known as Fanconi anemia. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were first reported in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto...

Researchers have announced a breakthrough that could end the ethical debate surrounding stem-cell research. The groundbreaking technique would allow the conversion of adult cells into an embryonic-like state. Researchers have been competing in recent years to reach just such a discovery, which would allow them to perform their work without using the controversial embryonic stem cell lines. Scientists at the the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego believe the key to their success is converting the cells by using recombinant proteins, which eliminates subsequent genetic alterations that typically occur during later stages. "Instead of inserting the four genes into the...

Here’s Josh Brahm explaining this “Oprah” spot, in which Dr. Oz comes out against embryonic stem-cell research on scientific grounds (Warning: In it he handles, pokes and slices a real human brain).  Catholics remember sadly that Michael J. Fox was a huge proponent of clone-and-kill stem-cell research. How ironic that President Obama, who claims to want to “follow science” is funding precisely the kind of research that the medical community is abandoning. See Josh Brahm’s essay “9 Things the Media Messed Up About the Obama Stem Cell Story.”On the “Oprah” show, Dr. Mehmet Oz handles the brain of a 50-year-old...

A team of scientists has advanced stem cell research by finding a way to endow human skin cells with embryonic stem cell-like properties without inserting potentially problematic new genes into their DNA. The team was led by James A. Thomson, V.M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and supported in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a component of the National Institutes of Health. This is not the first time that scientists have endowed differentiated cells like skin cells with the capacity to develop into any of the roughly 220 types of cells in the body, a...

President Obama Also Kills Bush Executive Order for Adult Stem Cell Research by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com Editor March 10, 2009 Email RSSPrint Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- President Barack Obama did more on Monday than just force taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research that requires the destruction of human life. He also rescinded an executive order President Bush put into place funding adult stem cells and new research with iPS cells.Obama also rescinded Executive Order 13435 of June 20, 2007.President Bush put that order in place in June 2007 when he vetoed a Congressional measure that would have required embryonic...

Stem-cell advance could bring tailored treatments closer. Researchers are close to making safer stem cells.K. Woltjen et al. For the first time, specialized human cells have been transformed into a state similar to that seen in embryonic stem cells, without using viruses. The advance edges stem-cell biologists closer to clearing a barrier to using reprogrammed cells for therapies and drug screening."The field has been waiting for these papers," says Marie Csete, chief scientific officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent — capable of generating all the body's specialized cell types —...

Scientists in Canada and Scotland have developed a virus-free method for generating embryonic-like stem cells that does not involve destroying embryos. Scientists say the new approach to growing so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells is an important step toward creating safe and reliable populations of cells for research and therapy. To create iPS cells, researchers turn back the clock in mature cells. They do this by reactivating dormant genes associated with pluripotency--a primitive state in which a cell has the potential to become any cell type in the body. Scientists first introduced iPS cells in 2006 and since then have...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Researchers said on Tuesday they had made a type of nerve cell out of ordinary skin cells in a new approach to stem cell research. They made motor neurons out of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells -- a type of cell made from ordinary skin cells that resembles human embryonic stem cells. Scientists hope that iPS cells might offer a substitute for embryonic stem cells and a short-cut to tailored medical therapy for a range of diseases. Motor neurons make muscles contract, and being able to make new motor neurons might help treat diseases such...

By inserting genes that turn back a cell's developmental clock, researchers are gaining insights into disease and the biology of how a cell decides its fate This year, scientists achieved a long-sought feat of cellular alchemy. They took skin cells from patients suffering from a variety of diseases and reprogrammed them into stem cells. The transformed cells grow and divide in the laboratory, giving researchers new tools to study the cellular processes that underlie the patients' diseases. The achievement could also be an important step on a long path to treating diseases with a patient's own cells. CREDIT: C. BICKEL/SCIENCE...

Since their discovery, stem cells have been hailed as the ultimate answer for crippling and incurable diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other conditions that leave vital organs like heart or nerves damaged beyond repair. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, under the leadership of Professor Austin Smith, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge, recently published a paper detailing a new technology that can transform adult stem cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). This technique is able to reliably reprogram adult cells into iPS rapidly and can forego the need...

London, October 18 : An research team in the U.S. has made a major advance in repeatedly generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from the tiny number of keratinocytes attached to a single hair plucked from a human scalp. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who led the study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, said that the breakthrough provided a practical and simple alternative for the generation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells, which had been hampered by the low efficiency of the reprogramming process. The researcher also said that the new process could spare patients invasive procedures to collect...

(UWIRE.com) This story was written by June Q. Wu, Harvard Crimson Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute are one step closer to achieving the ultimate promise of stem cell research creating tissues for every part of the body without the use of harmful viruses or cancer-causing genes. Harvard Medical School professor Konrad A. Hochedlinger and his colleagues reported last week on the Web site of the journal Science that they have created mouse induced pluripotent stem cells without permanently altering the genetic makeup of the cells. Their technique allows scientists to genetically manipulate a patients cells typically skin cells...