A graduate student oath -- will it help?

by Beyond Lab

University of Toronto created a graduate student oath to let the students remember their social and moral responsibilities, in other words, to conduct research ethically. I think one of the reasons is to try to avoid so many scientific misconduct in the scientific research area. To name a few, the Korean tem cell scandal, the recent retract of an important paper by Linda Buck, a Nobel prize laureate. There are not only irreproducibility of their data, but also the way they put all responsibility to one of the co-first authors. All these are absolutely not normal and should not happen in the pursuit of science.

Will this oath help? I completely doubt it. -- The overall scientific environment is so competitive, mainly financially, that researchers have to publish before their competitors and have to publish in good journals to secure enough support for their continuing research, and their personal salary in many cases.

Is there any way out? Things have to be changed gradually. Higher NIH budget (in US) is definitely one of the first things to do.

stem cell patent?

http://genefinding.blogspot.com/2008/04/warf-is-evil.html

Steven Salzberg, a Professor of bioinformaticsat at the University of Maryland, raised the question of patenting stem cells by WARF - Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Many aspects involved here, for example, is patent a good thing at all? Is patenting research a good thing? Is patenting research funded by public money a good thing? Look at people's comments. Interesting topic to discuss.

My point is simple: patent them but give them free (or almost free) to academic researches.

Stem Cell meeting

The 6th ISSCR (International Society for Stem Cell Research) Annual Meeting will be held from June 11 to 14, 2008 in Pennsylvania.

Looking at the speaker list, you will regret if you are in this field but you will miss this conference.

Conformed speakers include:

Sir John Gurdon FRS, Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, UK, Keynote Address
Rudolf Jaenisch, MD, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, USA, Closing Address
...
Douglas A. Melton, PhD, Harvard University, USA
...
Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, Kyoto University, Japan

and more...

Parkinson's disease - new information

Parkinson's disease has been thought to be a good disease model where cell replacement could actually help. It's caused by the damage of a particular kind of neural cells by an abnormally formated protein. Therefore anything replacing these damaged cells are thought to be effective. Stem cell researchers around the world are trying to make this kind of cells from embryonic stem cells for replacement. However it should be noted that earlier trials in 1990s already started injecting normal cells from aborted fetuses into the affected patients' brains to replace those cells destroyed. Although not exactly same as stem cells, these researches did offer some useful information. First, the injected cells did actually survive and incorporated to the patients' brain system. Second, these cells could offer some benefit (although not dramatic in most cases).

Now, some of the patients have died and postmortem examinations told us something surprising -- in some cases, some of the injected cells acquired similar damage as the original disease cells. Parkinson's disease usually only hits old people. However those injected cells are still relatively "young" (slightly over one decade), how did these cells got the dangerous protein? No one could answer yet. Although only 6 cases were analyzed, these findings indicate the complex of this disease. Will the same thing happen to stem cell derived cells in the future? How to get away with this problem?

Further research is necessary. problems will be solved eventually.

another step toward regenerative medicine -- clonal precursor cells

A recently online paper from Regenerative Medicine (May 2008, Vol. 3, No. 3, Pages 281-302) entitled The ACTCellerate initiative: large-scale combinatorial cloning of novel human embryonic stem cell derivatives might offer something toward both basic research and clinical medicine.

Michael D. West (BioTime, Inc, Alameda, CA) et al. used a shotgun-like, or random induction/selection, approach to isolate 140 cell clones (hEP as they named them)from human embryonic stem (ES)cells. These cells are not ES cells anymore. They are differentiated toward various different lineages but not terminally differentiated either. What are they? Not sure yet as of now because further characterization and comparison to all known cell types in our body is required. Are they useful? Yes. 1) these cells are relibable sources because ES cells are extremely sensitive to all kinds of environment factors and too difficult to control in experiment. Therefore ES cells with the same name from different labs may actually be different things. These hEP clones, once properly characterized, could certainly provide a reliable source for research. 2) From these, further study may induce them into different cell types needed in medical research/practice. Currently, people can only induce ES cells into a limited number of final differentiated cells and they are not pure at all. These certainly limited the progress of research and regenerative medicine. They didn't say this --but I think it is very interesting and practical -- following the same shotgun approach, these hEP cells could be induced to further differentiate down the road to become more specified cell types (randomly). Certainly, some of them should be actual tissue cells and could be useful. These might actually bypass the difficult targeted induction approach.

Ethical problems? Of course. For example, what exactly are those hEP cells or the further differentiated cells as I proposed? New entity?? Questions like these certainly exist but the research should move on because humans will benefit eventually. A quote from a pioneer Sir John. Gurdon, "if something works well, ethical concerns will disappear."