”The results are striking,” said Professor Roberto Bolli, one of the research leaders from the University of Louisville in the US. ”While we do not yet know why the improvement occurs, we have no doubt now that ejection fraction increased and scarring decreased.
”If these results hold up in future studies, I believe this could be the biggest revolution in cardiovascular medicine in my lifetime.”
A total of 23 patients took part in the ”Scipio” trial, all of whom had suffered heart failure due to a previous heart attack. Sixteen were assigned to the stem cell therapy while the other seven received standard care.
Given how dramatic it is, it seems almost unethical to treat the others in any other way.
I’m hoping that I won’t need this, but given my family history, I may. Anyway, I’m glad it’s coming along.
…and opponents will be led by their A-team. The court is reportedly going to allow a total of four and a half hours of argument. That’s unusually long. They know that this will be an historic ruling. If they can do this, there are no limits to federal power.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Philip Klein is now saying it will be five and a half hours.
at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.
All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.