Faster, Please

Researchers at Scripps have converted skin cells directly to heart muscle:

“This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies.”

I found this an interesting (and flawed) analogy, though:

“In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish,” said Ding. “It was phenomenal to see.”

Ding points out the protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past and notes that giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.

“It is like launching a rocket,” he said. “Until now, people thought you needed to first land the rocket on the moon and then from there you could go to other planets. But here we show that just after the launch you can redirect the rocket to another planet without having to first go to the moon. This is a totally new paradigm.”

Actually, I don’t know anyone who thought that except for people who were promulgating a straw-man argument against the Vision for Space Exploration. For instance, some claimed that Bush’s plan was foolish because it proposed “building a Kennedy Space Center on the moon.” But the plan was never to land on the moon, and then depart from there for other planets. It was to utilize the resources of the moon to provide propellants and other consumables to interplanetary ships already in orbit, and save the expense of launching them all from earth. It may well be that this is equally economically impractical in the near term, but it’s not what the critics (and the Scripps researcher) seem to think it is.

By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers. Or perhaps some blend of both.

8 thoughts on “Faster, Please”

  1. By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers.

    Journalists write as though engineers only exist on trains. All other engineers are, “scientists.” These are the folks whose words we should take as, “fact.”

  2. I’d say more scientists. They’re working in an area where the behavior of their material isn’t well characterized yet. It becomes engineering once the material behavior is understood better.

  3. The “Moon” analogy is probably, and unfortunately, typical of most people that don’t follow spaceflight issues. The reporter did not take issue because to him it probably seem apt as well. Collectively, as you have pointed out, people just aren’t into space travel and have only vague notions of what is going on and why.

  4. By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers. Or perhaps some blend of both.

    I have often thought that there is a missing field of study between Science, Engineering and Business — i.e. Invention.

  5. wodun Says:

    There must be some mistake. I’m sure they meant to say stem cells not skin cells.

    If you read the linked article, they mean skin cells. The apparent breakthrough is that they didn’t have to convert skin cells to stem cells first.

    Bypassing the Stem Cell Stage

    The team introduced the same four genes initially used to make iPS cells into adult skin fibroblast cells, but instead of letting the genes be continuously active in cells for several weeks, they switched off their activities just after a few days, long before the cells had turned into iPS cells. Once the four genes were switched off, the scientists gave a signal to the cells to make them turn into heart cells.

    “In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish,” said Ding. “It was phenomenal to see.”

    Ding points out the protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past and notes that giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.

  6. To be fair, the good doctor did say “people think”- he was drawing an analogy based on how most people think about the space program. I doubt he intended to weigh in on the subject of rocket engineering.

    As someone who’s spent some time in a cell biology lab, my opinion is that it’s still in the realm of tissue science, rather than tissue engineering, in that the underlying principles behind this are still being worked out. It’s a fuzzy line, but the work I saw was still aimed more at discovering basic principles than trying to make something with real-world applications.

    The rate of discovery is definitely accelerating, though, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that someone is already taking a stab at some bona fide tissue engineering.

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