If you follow the news, you'd think there hasn't been much to celebrate in the stem cell world lately.
From overly optimistic speculation to ideological opposition to actual fraud, there have been many reasons for proponents of the use of this new technology to treat diseases to be down in the dumps.
So today's news out of Johns Hopkins University that stem cell therapy helped paralyzed rats walk is timely and welcome. While ACSH regularly points to deficiencies in animal cancer studies, we do recognize the importance of using animal studies to help us understand physiology.
The religious right's opposition to this promising science arises from their belief that we are in some way creating new humans from stem cells. The public is confused in part because therapeutic stem cell research is often mislabeled as "cloning," in the sense of creating an entire duplicate human being. Fortunately, the new rat study illustrates in a concrete way that this is not about "cloning" but rather about something as straightforward and meritorious as repairing the body. While human applications of stem cell therapy are many years away, the study to be published in the journal Annals of Neurology is an important step towards possible treatment of spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig's disease, and some forms of multiple sclerosis.
I don't know whether the Hopkins researchers actually paralyzed the rats themselves. But I assume they didn't find them in a rat rehab facility, and that might make this research the target of extreme animal rights groups as well. If you value human and rat lives equally, you too might also oppose such tests. But the potential benefits to humans over the long term is exciting.
Later this year, scientists hope to replicate the study on pigs, laying the groundwork for eventual human clinical trials. This is good news that, if it holds our attention beyond just this news cycle, might dispel some of the public's wariness about such research.
Jeff Stier, Esq., is an associate director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
