Carey Rowland's blog

PGD: a new stem cell reconciliation?

When a man and a woman make love and give life together to a new person, this is a beautiful event. The love act is creative in every sense of the word, but most especially because of this: the two lovers have contributed to an eternally procreative art project that has been blooming on our planet for a very long time.

Whoever or whatever the Creator of this life process is, or is up to, is not my question to explore just now, although I have made some decisions in my belief about that question. I merely want to point out a fact or two about the process through which we humans have come to have our individual existences. 

Fact #1 is this: you, as a human person, have 46 chromosomes. 

2.) 23 of your chromosomes were passed to you from your father; the other 23 came from your mother.

3.) These chromosomes, or coded genetic programs, establish a biological framework for your physical existence and life-long development.

4.) Since the unique man who is your father paired his 23 with the 23 chromosomes within that unique woman who is your mother, then you yourself are unique. You--your particular combination of 46 chromosomes-- had never existed before. So you are a unique creation. Congratulations. There has never been another "you"; nor will there ever be.  

These days, microbiologists can husband this human-making process in a laboratory. Believe it or not. It is not as much fun--not nearly as satisfying-- as making babies the time-tested Adam and Eve hubba hubba way. But hey, this test-tube thing is happening. This is what humans, in their quest for improvement, do. The scientific rationale for in vitro fertilization is this: some couples have not been able to conceive a child naturally, and so they can get  clinical help to bridge that fertility gap.    After obtaining sperm from a man, and an egg from a woman, the microbiologist combines them (in the famous "test tube"), and a new human is begun. 

Here's where the scientific work, and the ethical discussion surrounding it, becomes a breeding ground for controversy. My opinion is: Since a unique, never-before-existing 46-chromosome arrangement is manifested in space and time, soon to be flesh and blood--no matter how the conception was facilitated-- we have a new human being our hands. This is creation, by which we men and women participate with the original Creator. And it is serious business, because a person's life--and entire lifetime development--is at stake. There are great--dare I say "sacred" responsibilities present here.

Well, simple enough, really. Not. The further you climb on the tree of knowledge (or the double-helix of DNA), the more complex do your choices become. This is part of what Moses was getting at when he wrote Genesis. But I'll not go there now, as if I could. Anyway,  as it turns out, there is another reason that scientists have for working with in vitro embryos. Some of them are leftovers.  

Yes, Virginia, the outcome of the test-tube baby boom is that we have thousands, possibly millions, of little embryos suspended in cold-storage, probably at about -196º C.  Most of them will never be implanted in a mother's womb. Some of them will be, but not all. So guess what--another thing that's happening is this: the key to medical progress is contained deep within the very life process itself, beginning with its earliest stage, the embryo. These frozen embryos. So the scientific community wants to call these microscopic potentialities into the service of mankind--involuntarily, of course--by harvesting their totipotent genetic characteristics to improve the health of living persons.These little ones are the source for the famous "embryonic stem cell" lines that are cultured in petri dishes in laboratories all over the world.

So then the question becomes, quite infamously: Are we, as a human race of civilized persons, going to allow these suspended potential kids to be sacrificed, for the sake of medical progress, so that already-living persons can have qualitatively better lives?

We don't want to kill those 46-chromosome-bearing new creations just for the sake of heartlessly improving our own already-established lives. That would be, in the biblical sense, not unlike child sacrifice. Civilized people don't do that, do we?

Well guess what. I heard on the radio yesterday that microbiologists have developed a technique for obtaining individual embryonic stem cells from a 3-day embryo (in what's called the "cleavage" stage of fetal development) without killing the embryo. The procedure is called PGD, which stands for pre-implantation diagnosis. In it, the microbiologist extracts a single cell  from the 8-cell embryo, leaving the embryo virtually intact for further development and life. 

The PGD single-cell extraction procedure has been widely used all over the world. According Dr. Robert Lanza, in his statement during an interview with Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday (NPR), its use is dependable. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201275 Dr. Lanza's research pertains to stem cell therapy for improved eyesight in patients who have suffered macular degeneration. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960028-2/abstract  

But what caught my pro-life ear was Dr. Lanza's mention of this technique for obtaining totipotent embryonic stem cells without killing the fetus. The little guy gives up a single cell, then moves on to further development. Assuming the best, maybe its a little like giving blood. 

A little further reading brought me to: 

http://www.pennmedicine.org/fertility/patient/clinical-services/pgd-preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis/#step-by-step-process and this explanation: "After three days in culture, the embryos typically reach the eight–cell stage. One to two cells are removed from each embryo on day three and analyzed..." 

The extracted cell ia generally used for a genetic assessment of the embryo, so that parents, assisted by the scientists and doctors, can make choices about which of the embryos to choose for implantation in the mother's womb. This is another controversial development in the can-of-DNA-worms that constitutes genetic research and practices--"designer babies," and so and so on…

But my interest in this procedure revolves around its potential as a reconciliation between the value that we pro-lifers place on embryonic sanctity, and scientific use of surplus embryos without wholesale killing of them. A little more googling brought me to more info, from a fertility clinic in Houston, where I found this (emphasis mine):

http://www.houstonivf.net/Services/PreimplantationGeneticDiagnosis.aspx 

"Preimplantation genetics can be performed in vitro at any of the following developmental stages, the zygote (day 1), cleavage stage (day 3) or blastocyst (day 5). At each of these stages, cell(s) are removed from the embryo for genetic testing in special laboratories. This does not appear to harm the ongoing development of the embryo with over 1000 healthy babies born worldwide after preimplantation genetic screening. However, an insufficient number of babies have been born to confirm that the procedure is completely without risk.

So now I'm wondering: Does this change, at all, the debate between pro-life opponents of embryonic stem-cell research, and the researchers whose microscope sights are trained on all those frozen surplus embryos?

Glass Chimera

Something from Nothing

 Today, I am going to expose to you my ignorance of quantum mechanics in the study of physics. Furthermore, you will plainly see that my childish grasp of the physicists' exposition of this phenomenon is woefully inadequate, even naive.  But it doesn't matter if you can detect right off the bat how blatantly dense is my take on the matter. You see, I am one of those who short circuits the rational pursuit of truth by inserting faith in a Creator where there should by all hypothetical propositions be an equation, or some hard-earned experimental data.

It all started with this: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201132, wherein Lawrence Krauss is discussing the contents of his new book,  A Universe From Nothing, with Ira Flatow, and Lawrence makes such potentially gravitational statements as "Nothing is unstable," meaning that nothingness itself is unstable, insofar as that it has a habit of generating stuff out of itself (nothing) out in space.  

"Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them."

Spontaneous generation, we used to call it, and thinking about it is, as Lawrence points out, a little bit "like counting angels on the head of a pin." 

But somewhere in the half-life of Lawrence's broadcast/webcast explanations, what really set my neurons hurdling  into photonic frenzies is this idea that an electron, which is whirring somewhat orbitally around a proton, cannot be adequately assessed in terms of its position in relation to the proton, or in relation to, for that matter (haha) anything else. This is because, as soon as the analyst, or scientist, casts light on the subject particle(wave) in question, in order to view the electron and make some kind of determinating statement about it, the light (the energetic effect of the light) itself alters the quarky little rascal, rendering its position indeterminable! Imagine that! Like trying to herd cats.

And Lawrence also mentioned:

"Whole universes can pop out of nothing, by the laws of quantum mechanics."

Ha!  I was stumped.

I tried, well into the evening  and the nighttime, to wrap my warpish mind around all this, which must resemble a light beam trying to keep up with a neutrino, as the French say in Switzerland.  I was getting  a little short on the fourth dimension while trying to capture the essence of  those quarks in question and fathom their unquantifiable fidgettance. And then, as if that weren't enough produndity to drag my faltering comprehension into a blackhole, Paul Krugman's recent comparison between Austrian economics and the 18th-century theory of phlogiston in chemistry popped out of nowhere, not to mention Higgs-Boson confusion on top of that, and...

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. . . and the faith-based  short circuit suddenly presented itself, when my friend Dave sent out his daily ditty,  http://outdeep.com/2012/01/13/light-in-our-heart , which started with this conveniently accessible concept:

For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6)

to which my friend had also added:

 "The sovereign creativity of God to bring forth what to us would have been unthinkable is staggering.  This artistic endeavor of the Divine is used to illustrate the similar work of enlightening my heart."

Wherefore, I in my lay-like confusion decided to just go with that, call it a day, and hit the hay, where my wife was so peacefully sleeping in preparation for today's nursing duties. I had found a universal incarnation that I could wrap my weary mind around. Now this morning, the sun shines brightly on snow out in the back .40. Thank God for a beautiful winter day here in the inexplicable universe. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. Grits is good too, for breakfast, with cheese.

 Glass half-Full

The power of the universe

With impressive regularity, the moon orbits the earth every 28 days or so. This arrangement produces some very real effects on what happens to us and to our planetary home.

Long ago when I was in school, I learned that the mysterious white orb up in the night sky has a gravity of its own. Like every object that exists anywhere, it has a power to compel other objects in its direction. This gravity attribute of matter, which is proportional to  its mass, is an important part of the mechanics of the universe.  An intricate clockwork of physical events is constructed around it. Thanks to Johannes Kepler and  Isaac Newton, among many other wise men who lived long ago, for figuring this out.

I suppose heavenly objects are  a little like people in this respect--posessing a kind of magnetism that produces a sphere of influence. But among humans the attractive forces are relatable more to personality, leadership, status, charm, and such immeasurable factors, rather than a person's size, or what the physicists call 'mass'.

But I was thinking about the moon because of what happened two days ago when Pat and I were at the beach; it was a scary event that is indirectly related to the moon's orbit around us. Now as I write this the moon's glory is fading, as its master the sun renders it invisible while I watch the sun come up over the island of Maui, Hawaii. Being awake so early,  I must still be on east coast time, even though its been a week ago since I was there.

But about the moon...Mostly we tend to think of gravitational forces between earth and moon in terms of the earth's greater gravity (due to its larger mass.) We see in the night sky the moon doing its thing, sort of hanging there night after night, seeming to travel an arc across the nocturnal sky as dusk pulls its curtain of darkness across the heavens, until dawn comes blasting all that blackness away, with sunny brightness and life-giving warmth.
We are forever accustomed to the fact that our earth powerfully determines the moon's behavior. But their cosmological connectedness works both ways. That little white sphere, so hopelessly tethered by gravity to its giant companion,  exerts an unyielding, and quite predictable, effect over our worldy substance.

This dynamic is most easily observed in our oceans. Collectively, they are an immense resource that no one can measure. But the little old moon, even as small as it seems to us, pushes our oceans around like plasmic silly putty all the time, every day and night. That precocious dimpled satellite grabs, for instance, our largest planetary mass, the Pacific ocean, at one end, so to speak. As earth revolves, the moon fluffs its massive surface waters like a great oceanic blanket, wrinkling it all the way from Canada to Australia, crumpling it from Japan to Chile, and everywhere in between and beyond.

Tremendous physical forces of nature are set in motion through thousands of miles of water, producing the tides,  the ocean swells, waves on the beach.

Right in the middle of all that lunar-induced force field of liquid dynamism is a string of islands we call Hawaii, which is where I now write this. Down there on the beach, which I am beginning to see again in the widening light of dawn, a wave crashes in the sand. It crashes because all that lunar-inflicted energy, which has passed in wave form across thousands of sea-miles, is suddenly resisted, and stopped, by a physical object--the beach. The mixture of energy in the wave--it may have  been (guessing) 70% potential energy and 30% kinetic--is uproariously transformed into 100% (?) kinetic energy as it strikes the shore and dissipates. 

A couple of days ago, Pat and I, fools that we are, happened to be standing in that Maui surf,  when the awesome power of the universe, having been channeled by our  feisty little tide-jerking earth-moon through the oceanic medium, came crashing against us with a force we had never heretofore experienced. The big wave came as the first among a set of  whoppers; it whipped Pat and me around like rag dolls for a few fearful seconds. Having been caught clueless in a tenacious explosion of kinetic water energy, we were lucky to recover and walk away from its ferocity, back to our little beach blanket island of sun-screen and security.

Well, not lucky--actually,  more like "saved." Saved by God, who is greater, and more benevolent, than all the jerky universe that stirs us around like fruity  chunks  in a beach-blender.
Do you think me naive to assume such a thing as God's protection in the midst of a terrible wave? It's okay. You may say that I'm a naive believer, but I'm not the only one. Another believer, one from ages long ago, wrote this about that same power of the universe, (from Psalm 93):

"The seas have lifted up, O Lord,
 the seas have lifted up their voice;
 the seas have lifted up their pounding waves,
 mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
 mightier than the breakers of the sea--
 the Lord on high is mighty."

Glass half-Full

The two types of stem cells

A couple of years ago, I delved into a personal research project,  in order to write my second novel,  Glass Chimera. From a layman’s perspective, I was learning about  genes, DNA, cloning, and other areas of scientific endeavor that pertain to the science of genetics.  I learned a lot about the human genome, more than I can ever understand or explain.

One particular area of genetics that is often discussed in our era is  the use of stem cells. My limited investigation into the subject has brought me to this observation about stem cells: there are basically two types of them.

 Embryonic stem cells are those found in the fertilized egg, or the embryo, of a newly-conceived fetus in a female’s uterus. These are the controversial stem cells, because the harvesting of them for medical use will most likely alter or terminate the embryo’s fetal development.  Embryonic stems cells are pluripotent, insofar as they have potential to differentiate into many types of cells that are necessary for a fully developed body to, after birth, sustain life. These cells can be directed by the DNA genetic code to become, for instance,  blood cells,  skin cells,  muscle,  nerve, or whatever cells. My limited studies have  indicated that the  main value of embryonic stem cells is found in their use for medical research.

 In the novel that I wrote while studying this, I include a hypothetical conversation between two graduate students in microbiology. In chapter 24, Erik is explaining  stem cells to his friend Sam:

 “. . .these guys that are doing this type of work, they remove the stem cells from the ICM (inner cell mass) that has congregated inside the 5-or-6-day old blastocyst—“

“So they’re sacrificing the embryo?” Sam wondered.

“I guess you could call it that,”

“What do they do with the outer part?”

“Oh, the trophoblast, God only knows.  I suppose they use it for something or other in the lab, or maybe they culture those cells for some other developmental purpose. I don’t know.  Anyway,  they place the totipotent stem cells into culture and propogate them.”

“That’s what we call a stem cell line,” observed Sam.

“Uhhuh, but it’s tricky.  Those cells have a built-in tendency toward differentiation.  If they’re kept alive unto themselves, without chemical restraints, they’ll start to organize themselves into an embryo again.”

 This “differentiation” potential of stem cells is their most useful attribute. At the same time, it is the very thing that makes them somewhat dangerous. 

 I mentioned above that there is another  type of stem cells: adult stem cell.  Their differentiation potential is quite limited, as compared to the embryonic type, but they are much safer for medical applications, mainly because they are obtained from a patient’s body, and then injected back into that same patient. So there’s no conflict between the genetic info in the medically modified stem cells and the genetic data resident in that patient’s other billions of cells.  This second type of stem cell, the “adult” type, exists in the body of every child and adult. They enable the growth of new bodily tissue, and they exist in every part of the body.   

 Yesterday, June 17 2011, I was fascinated as I listened to a very informative discussion  on the radio about new medical treatments  utilizing these adult stem cells to repair damaged tissue.

Ira Flatow was again demonstrating his customary excellence in science journalism. The depth and scope of  his NPR reporting  keeps  his show, Science Friday, on the cutting edge of popular science education. I always obtain galactical levels of new information and insight when I can listen to his Friday program, or catch it later online.

  The spot I heard yesterday was SciFri 061711 Hour 1: Black Holes, Untested Cell Therapies, Solar Update, which I had clicked on at

http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/listen.

 

Ira was speaking to two medical doctors about Bartolo Colon, the great NY Yankees pitcher whose injured pitching arm required medical treatment. Ira explained that since the pitcher was in the latter years of his baseball career, surgery to correct his elbow problem might be too risky. So Bartolo had elected to have this relatively untested therapy performed on his arm by doctors  in Dominican Republic.  And guess what, it worked! Bartholo has made an impressive comeback in his pitching career, at the age of 37.

 Dr. Rick Lehman, an orthopedic surgeon at the US  Center for Sports Medicine (in St. Louis), described how cells taken from Bartolo’s own body had been medically treated and then injected back into his injured shoulder and elbow. The immature stem cells, as the doc explained, act to recruit blood  supply, enhance healing of ligaments, and improve the natural healing mechanics inside the patient’s body.

 Dr. Scott Rodeo, orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery (in New York City) contributed to their fleshing out of the subject with specific comments about Bartolo Colon’s surgery, but also with some interesting facts about the different kinds of stem cells.  For instance, risk of cancer is far lower with the use of these adult stem cells than the risk from using  more primitive stem cells, such as those pluripotent ones found in embryos.

 As a writer whose research had skirted these areas pioneering medicine, I was fortunate to have heard their productive talk on NPR about the  minimally surgical restoration of a great pitcher’s arm.

And congratulations to Bartolo Colon, whose baseball career has been renewed.

Glass Chimera

Thanks for Frank's perspective

I've been racking my brain all weekend trying to get some more story-line for the new novel, Smoke, after writing only the beginnining of chapter 1 last week.

Then I got this attachment from my friend Frank:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=12ecf2c076bc3c1f&mt=application/vnd.ms-powerpoint&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui%3D2%26ik%3D205cde5d1d%26view%3Datt%26th%3D12ecf2c076bc3c1f%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dsafe%26zw&sig=AHIEtbR6Asl7-55bXA582rCKPKbp28sY8w&pli=1 

Frank sent this link to me because he is an astronomer. He's also an engineer who has, somewhere along his 95-year orbital path, built a telescope or two after grinding the  6-inch lenses. In addition to being a smart tinkerer, he has spent years of his long life being a great singer from New Jersey, a model-airplane constructor, a sailor, husband (for a while) and father, and inventor. Frank lives at the apartment complex where I work as the maintenance guy.

Sometimes I think if we had more enterprising folks like Frank we wouldn't be in such a dearth of employment opportunities. I wish the problem-solvers of this world could become as busy as Frank has been trying to make things work over  his 95 years on our planet.

So don't let the long link address above intimidate you. If you haven't yet had a good view of what the Hubble telescope is scoping up there in earth orbit, check it out. It's definitely a perspective-adjustment.

It certainly diverted my mind from:

...which is the starting point of my novel-in-progress. So far, I've got two characters, neither one of them are in the coronation pic above (Times of London, May 20,1937).  But my two characters, Philip Marlowe and Nathan Wachov, are just a  mile or two away, and trying to get to Trafalgar Square for a view of the new King's return procession to Buckingham Palace.

Anyway, those Hubble shots from my friend Frank,  linked above, changed my perspective on what appears to be the "Smoke" in our universe.

Smoke, the new novel-in-progress

Salt of the earth and hoi polloi gas

In the world of basic Earth elements, 8 is a kind of ideal number. Atoms (we could generally say) strive to achieve 8 electrons in their outer (reactive) shells, and when they do attain that status, they become relatively stable.

Those elements that manifest this condition of stability, aka inertness,  are a certain class of gases that have been named the "noble" gases, because they exist in their self-sufficiency; they disdain associations with the readily-reactive "salt of the earth" types.
Similarly, in the world of societies, as in the world of elements, we see that the nobility and  the salt of the earth tend to seek their own, instead of mingling with each other. In both systems  the natural world exhibits a diverse range of interactive predispositions, between these two polar ends.

Any particular atom of any element has a degree of reactivity which is determined by the number of electrons in its outer (valence) shell. Scientists have arranged a data table which indicates any particular element's affinity for reacting with other atoms. On that data table, which is called the Periodic Table, earth's elements are arranged from left to right according to the number of electrons in their outer shells , 1 through 8.
Having only one electron in its outer shell,  sodium (represented as Na on the Periodic Table of Elements) takes its assigned place  on the left side of the Table. Accordingly,  a sodium atom is found to be unstable, and therefore prone to react with some other element in order  to establish the ideal 8-electron  stability.

Well, along comes a Chlorine (Cl) atom, which, being from the other end of the lineup, has seven electrons in its outer shell--not the sought-after 8 status, mind you, but closer to it. They're both a little wobbly so they share resources, which in this case is outer electrons; groping for stability, they get hitched together. Lo and behold, they become in the process something totally different from what they were as separate entities--salt, chemically named NaCl. In  sacrificing individual identities (a la Confucius or Plato) the two elements become a new compound,  and thus yield a common mineral which is a universally useful resource: the salt of the earth.

Salt, which helps your food taste better.
Men and women have used the stuff since the dawn of civilization to flavor food, and also for another valuable use--preserving food so you can store it for a longer time before eating it.

Meanwhile, back on the other end of nature's arrangement of elements, floats the "noble" (gas) class--the hoi poloi whom some enviously call the richest 1% or whatever; they exist independently in a rarified condition of invested self-assurance and ease, while the salt of the earth legions mingle amicably among themselves and s0 dutifully among the other strata along the highways and byways.

We see that the elemental world is somewhat like the social world.
The world of Adam reflects somewhat the world of atoms. But take heart, we are on the Eve of some wonderfully interactive phenomena.

Glass Chimera

Searching for the God particle

After listening to Ira Flatow's discussion with Amir Aczel about the Large Hadron Collider project in France, I was contemplating the theoretical existence of the "God particle,"also known as the Higgs Boson particle, which "gives everything its mass."

The Higgs field is a mystery.  When shaken like a blanket, matter happens!  Our conceptualization of this transformation has major implications for us figuring out what happened during those first micro-seconds after the Big Bang.

I googled into a fairly accessible explanation of this physics problem: http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs1.htm

After grokking the immensity of this universe, and then fathoming the intense immensity of its incredible smallness, I was, as we simplistic Christians are prone to do, seeking even further simplification, and I found it in Genesis 1:4:
"And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness."
Furthermore, acting as Christ, we understand that God is "before all things, and in Him all things hold together."

That's oversimplified for sure, but it works for me. I do enjoy, however, being enlightened with the occasional CERN update from  Ira, Amir, Higgs, and the other physics guys in their atom-smashing trailblazing quests.
Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work, but let us know if that dark matter ever gets a little too unruly and hence upsets our super symmetry.

Glass half-Full

RNA developments

Back in 1953, scientists James Watson and Francis Crick figured out that the DNA molecule was composed of millions of little paired chemical connections called nucleotides. The nucleotides were like rungs of a ladder that held together two vastly long strands of phosphate-sugar.
But the ladder of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is not straight and rigid like you would think of a ladder. It's a twisty, floppy thing that spirals ever onward as it develops. It's a kind of spiral staircase upon which life has ascended from one phase to another over the last few millions or billions of years.
As the DNA double-helix molecule evolves, it keeps flopping over on itself, like a pile of spaghetti, because that's the only thing it can do in its confined little nucleus world.
But I'm not here to tell you about a can of worms or a pile of spaghetti. What fascinates me at this moment is the article I just read in The Scientist magazine by Dr.Anna Maria Pyle.

Dr. Pyle wrote about RNA in the September issue. RNA is a complex molecule similar to DNA. It's only half as wide, so to speak, being a single strand instead of double. It lollygags around the nucleus and unzips DNA down the middle, to assist the DNA in its replication and its mutagenic experiments . So thanks to RNA, life goes on, and it keeps changing as it goes.
Or at least that's my understanding of it so far. Of course the whole dam thing is much more complicated than that. Like I said, it's a can of worms, or a pile of spaghetti.
Dr. Pyle, though, along with other chemists, microbiologists and God-knows-what-all-ists across the world, are conducting work beneath their electron microscopes to unravel those piles of nucleic material and make some sense of their workings. I say "make some sense," meaning that they seek to explain the intricate processes of life that take place within the genomes. The DNAs and RNAs already make sense, being endowed as they are by their creator with certain inalienable characteristics, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of chromosomes.

Her September report expands our understanding of how RNA (ribonucleic acid) folds, and how it serves as a scaffold and facilitator in the cell environment. Dr. Pyle writes: "...there is a time in the life of every cell when even the most important RNA has to be refolded, disassembled or recycled so that something new can happen."

So, its somewhat like human politics. In the microcosm and the microcosm, pretty much the same thing is going on everywhere.
But I digress. Getting back to the nuclear heart of the matter, Watson and Crick had discovered that DNA strands were held together by paired nucleotides, those rungs of the ladder I mentioned earlier. What scientists are finding now is that there are other ways (besides the G,A,T, and C ladder-rung links) that the DNAs and RNAs can hook up in new combinations; they can connect by crossings with the long vertical (sugar-phosphate) strands as well.

Dr. Pyle writes in her September report about "genetic elements that jump around, copying and inserting themselves into new genomic locations and new hosts. Through this process, they bring new genes with them, or they chop up long genes into multiple pieces that can be used in various combinations, potentially leading to great diversity of expressed protein types..."

A very expressive chain of events, is this thing we call Life.

In other news, I have been wondering for a while now about the so-called "junk DNA" that constitutes most of our human genome. Its all the genetic material that they haven't figured out yet what it does. Although Dr. Anna Maria Pyle does not mention junk DNA, she does make this curious statement at the end of her article:

"We now know from the human genome project and from studies of the "transcriptome" that the vast majority of our DNA does not encode proteins at all; rather, it encodes RNA. RNA is far more important in biology than any of us imagined even five years ago."

I thought so too.
I have fictionalized, and personified, some of these adventurous RNA expeditions in my new novel, Glass Chimera, a story that includes a subnucleic tale about Cap'n Dean Gene and his crew of amino-angling sailors aboard the HMS RuNAbout. In my episode, Cap'n Dean takes on a cocky new recruit named Henry Globin, as they're cruising around inside the antagonist's (a guy named Mick) body. Imagine that.

about stem cells

Here's an excerpt from my novel, Glass Chimera, which has, thank God, at last been committed to print.

...from chapter 24:

You were saying, Erik?”

                “Reproductive cloning is for procreation of superior breeding stock, kind of like tweaking natural selection.  We’re assisting nature, and stepping up the process, to yield progeny that is better-equipped.  Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, is for improving specific genes—replacing defective ones that would lead to disease or disability with normal ones. In therapeutic procedures, the blastocyst is never implanted into a mother. It’s dissected so that the totipotent stem cells in its inner mass can be reproduced in large quantities in lab cultures.”  Erik took a bite from his donut.

                “Yeah, in Petri dishes,” added Sam.

                “Or whatever containers they’re using these days,” said Erik.

“Are you talking about mouse embryos, or human?”asked Sam.

“You know there’s been a lot of this type of work done in the last fifty years or so with frogs and mice and other small species.  Now they’re starting to refine these procedures so that they can be applied to human development.”

“So we’re talking about recovering the inner cell mass from human blastocysts?”

“For therapeutic purposes. This type of cloning affords us large quantities of totipotent cells in the laboratory, to identify and replace genes that express  as diseases .”

“Right, the congenital diseases like Parkinson’s, and cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy—“

“Yeah.  There are a bunch of them.”

“So these guys at Wisconsin and Hopkins and other labs recover the inner cell mass, which is composed, during the cleavage stage in the first few days, of totipotent stem cells.”

“The most powerful cells on earth!” exclaimed Sam.

“Almost.” Erik laughed. “ Geron says the most totipotent—sounds  like some  tyrant that’s stuck on himself, doesn’t it?  ”

“He probably wants to clone himself,”cracked Sam.

“Hahahaha”

  Erik continued. “So the most totipotent” He lifted his hands in mock adoration“. . .are the ‘primordial germ cells.’”

“EG cells,” affirmed Sam.

“Exactly—the ‘key to human immortality’ as some have called them. They’re the ones that develop in the embryo, after gastrulation, in the testes or ovaries as the fetal sex organs begin  to form.”

“But anyway, getting back to the blastula stage,” Sam prompted.

“Yes, thank you, as I was saying before the most totipotent microscopic primordial germ cells  reared their germy little heads, hahaha. . .these guys that are doing this type of work, they remove the stem cells from the ICM that has congregated inside the 5-or-6-day old blastocyst—“

“So they’re sacrificing the embryo?” Sam wondered.

“I guess you could call it that,”

“What do they do with the outer part?”

“Oh, the trophoblast, God only knows.  I suppose they use it for something or other in the lab, or maybe they culture those cells for some other developmental purpose. I don’t know.  Anyway,  they place the totipotent stem cells into culture and propogate them.”

“That’s what we call a stem cell line,” observed Sam.

“Uhhuh, but it’s tricky.  Those cells have a built-in tendency toward differentiation.  If they’re kept alive unto themselves, without chemical restraints, they’ll start to organize themselves into an embryo again.”

“I was reading about this last week in Cell.  To keep them in the primordial state, they grow them on a feeder layer of mouse cells or something similar that have been irradiated so they won’t themselves be dividing.”

“Yeah.  The feeder layer underneath secretes proteins that nourish the stem cells above.”

“And I think there’s something about the feeder layer that stimulates the stems to multiply instead of differentiate,” Sam added.

“But at some point, they want to pull some of the stem cells out and let them differentiate,” said Erik.  “That’s really what it’s all about—generating a massive number of pluripotent cells that they can tinker with in order to produce muscle cells, or bone cells, blood cells, whatever is called for in the particular research that they’re doing.”

“Neurons?” Sam wondered.

“ I think they’re the hardest ones to reproduce.” said Erik.

“The cells of the central nervous system don’t take kindly to regenerating.  That’s what I’ve read.  They’re pretty stubborn,” agreed Sam.

“The myelin sheath keeps them kind of bundled up, or—“

“I think the lab guys are using neural stem cells to try and get some regeneration going with them.”

“Adult stem cells?” asked Erik.

“Yeah, neural stem cells, like those that are found in the brain and spinal cord of any adult,” said Sam. 

The unchosen frozen

The slice-and-dice strategy that dehumanized mortgage-backed securities trading is now threatening to similarly commandeer regenerative medical ethics. Jeff Jacoby's statement
is typical of the trend that desensitizes our appreciation of human life and human potential.
He writes: "there is no moral obstacle to using leftover fertility-clinic embryos that would otherwise be discarded for medical research. Nor do I regard a microscopic cluster of cells as a human person entitled to full legal protection."

Now on the other side of the ethical divide comes Judge Judge Royce Lamberth, who, on behalf of  a few plaintiffs and several other million conscientious people in this nation, decides to throw up the judicial warning flags on untethered embryonic stem cell research,
so that we are not sliding on some slippery slope of  moral morass toward nanosurgical human trafficking by which unchosen potential  persons are being frozen wholesale into an inventory of non-voluntary fetal sacrifice instead of being born into the robust life on  this groovy planet.
So here  come chicken-littleish federally-funded researchers  whining the cassandra blues because the whole unbridled research universe is said to revolve around the totipotent Federal Government with its infinite supply of fiat quantitative easing and perpetual petri-dish cultured NIH funding.
Only a couple days ago, even though I love to listen to the timely and informative discussions on my favorite news-talk source, the Diane Rehm show (August 31st),
I was alarmed to hear Dr. Daley and Mr. Tipton  protesting loudly that the sky is falling on stem cell research because without the feds all our research and stem cell lines are stopped in their nanoscopic tracks.
Not so.
There's nothing wrong with utilizing a few ethics-bounded parameters to level the funding field so that private investors can maintain an activating enterprise-based support for disease-breaking  medical progress.
Consider, for instance,  the progressive research being done at Geron Corporation.
Their  recent news release reports a few favorable developments in stem cell research:

~"The FDA notification enables Geron to move forward with the world's first clinical trial of a human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based therapy in man. The Phase I multi-center trial is designed to establish the safety of GRNOPC1 in patients with "complete" American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale grade A subacute thoracic spinal cord injuries."

~"Thomas B. Okarma, Ph.D., M.D., Geron's president and CEO. 'Our goals for the application of GRNOPC1 in subacute spinal cord injury are unchanged - to achieve restoration of spinal cord function by the injection of hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells directly into the lesion site of the patient's injured spinal cord.' "

~"GRNOPC1, Geron's lead hESC-based therapeutic candidate, contains hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells that have demonstrated remyelinating and nerve growth stimulating properties leading to restoration of function in animal models of acute spinal cord injury (Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 25, 2005)."

That's good news for people who've suffered spinal cord injuries.

The experimental and clinical work being conducted by this one company alone is evidence that privately funded research can contribute greatly to medical improvement. We need not put all our embryos in one federally-funded basket.
Let willing investors, instead of overburdened taxpayers, take the risk on some of this experimentation. Require  the feds to play by tighter ethical rules so that our developing standard regenerative procedures are founded (and funded!) on solid human rights practice. Furthermore, we can spread the money more equitably to better facilitate adult stem cell, and induced pluripotent adult stem cell, research.