In recent news, President Obama made a move to legalize stem cell research, a move which was quickly faced with firm opposition. In good form, the legislation was was recinded in favor of dealing with more pressing issues, such as economy and health care reformations. Once these problems are solved, however, it seems likely that the topic will be reopened and buckets of money will be poured into stem cell research grants.
Now, the quick money will certainly go to high-profile cases such as organ transplants, cancer research, degenerative diseases, and heart disease (as well it should). As society accepts these benefits, we'll likely see a new-wave fad of "create your child" advocates from Hollywood, which provides a slippery slope to the underlying question of genetic population modification. As a society then, we must decide whether aspects of our own collective genetic pool should be treated like any other common cancer in the body. A colletive cancer of society, embedded in genetics. While we must certainly not hap-hazardly hack away at the worlds genetic pool (facist geneology is not cool), it is not difficult to see the social benefit of removing certain genetic abnormalities from the genetic pool. Ask any parent of an autistic or down-syndrom child and they can tell you how difficult the weight of these ailments can be. For the sake of the betterment of future generations
Now, I am not a medical professional. I have taken a variety of biology, chemistry, sports medicine, and human physiology courses, however, and given visual technology's close ties with medical applications, I do my best to keep my ear to the ground on the latest in dna and stem cell research. Despite it's potential morale issues (such as embrionic stem cells use), I believe the proper application of research we can find an solution which makes the ethical topics , irrelavent.
In fact, researchers have already found ways to extract stem cells from skin tissue. Skin can be kept alive in graphs for periods of time, and is one of the most elastic and regenerative of the body's organs. It can even be regraphted to another person using blocker drugs. What begs my interest, is whether the shelf life of skin could be extended by application of stem cells at the exposed edges of the skin graph. The benefit to existing organ donor reserves would be a nice benefit. A much greater benefit would be if the economy of this cycle would allow the extraction of surplus stem cells. In other words, is it possible to collect enough stem cells from a skin grapht to generate a net gain, by reapplying them to the skin grapht itself. Such a find would allow us avert that potentially perilous ethical issues currently involved with embrionic stem cell research.
In the long run the smart money in is on skin being the most simple, elastic, and renewable of human organs and is likely capable of showing the highest yield to investment ratio.
After all, what good are all the stem cell solutions in the world, if no one has any stem cells.. ( well, except for China ) .. :-(
