If it ain't broke, don't break it more

It was really annoying to watch stem cell therapy get so heavily oversold in the 06 election cycle. Stem cell therapy seems to me like a fantastic way to give people cancer, and it turns out (registration required) that it is, at least in a recent case. Cancer is when your cells decide they're just going to keep reproducing past what the rest of your body can stand, and messing with the signals your body long ago relied on to stop making more of you strikes me as pretty dangerous - especially in the case of brain tissue.

Basically, if your brain keeps growing when you're out of the womb, your brain is growing cancer. A lot of brain cancer occurs in very young children, when the process of stopping the proliferation of brain tissue is critical, and prone to error.

Introducing non-native cells that will proliferate according to signals out of sync with what is going on in the rest of your body strikes me as extremely dangerous. When the rest of your body is letting your cerebral tissue degenerate, what is in-sync is already quite dangerous, but trading a degenerative disease for a malignant cancerous one doesn't make things much better.

But hey, I can't blame people for trying. Or give up on the idea after seeing a case report.

Comments

[ballgame]

It was really annoying to watch stem cell therapy get so heavily oversold in the 06 election cycle.

I agree, Sara, oversold and overemphasized. While the revulsion against Bush's Stand Against Science was probably pretty prevalent, it didn't seem likely to me that there was some great mass clamoring for stem cell therapy. (If I'm wrong, I hope somebody points it out.) I would have wagered there would have been much greater popular support for a re-thinking of our Free Trade policies than for so much focus on this particular field of scientific inquiry.

[kathy a.]

there is a lot more basic research needed with stem cells; i thought that was the point, really.

your post is breaking my heart again, because a young friend was diagnosed with a medullablastoma when he was 9, and he died at 12 despite so many treatments, and so much love. one of his treatments was a stem-cell transplant -- but using his own stem cells, harvested from his own blood. it worked much like a bone marrow transplant: massive chemo, then infusions of the cells to replace healthy ones that were lost. he did live for 2 years after that, and mostly was able to enjoy his time. the problem, for him, wasn't the stem cells; it was the cancer that could not be fully removed without killing him outright.

brain cancer is a really hard example, i expect. even non-malignant growths in the brain are potentially deadly, because there is no space in there; we are designed with skulls that do not expand readily.

[kathy a.]

but stem cells are so tantalizing; they hold the potential for replacing tissues in ways that no surgery could. we just do not know enough yet.

[Crissa]

We'll never figure out the signs for turning on and off without investigating stem cells, whether they're used directly for treatments or not.

Cells reproducing will eventually create cancer based upon evolution theory.

Therefore, it is in our best interest in knowing how to stop those rogue cells and how to replace them once they're gone.