New Human Trial With Adult Stem Cells to Treat MS in the UK
The media will continue to squawk about how embryonic stem cells may years from now treat MS, but adult stem cells are already moving forward into human trials in the UK. (As I previously reported, adult stem cells have stopped MS from worsening in a Canadian human trial.) From the Telegraph story:
Neil Scolding, professor of clinical neurosciences for North Bristol NHS Trust, who is leading the trial, said: "We believe that bone marrow cells have the capability to repair precisely the type of damage that we see in the brain and spinal cord in MS.So by giving patients very large numbers of their own bone marrow cells we hope that this will help stabilise the disease and bring about some repair."This is very exciting. If it works--admittedly a big if--a lot of people are going to receive a lot of benefit.The trial, which started six months ago, is one of the first to use patients' own bone marrow stem cells to treat their MS. It involves six people with MS, aged between 30 and 60, having a pint of bone marrow extracted from their pelvises. The processed material, containing stem cells, is then injected on the same day into the patients' arms.
Over a period of months, the patients will be monitored closely and given regular brain scans to see what impact the treatment has had on them.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:37 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
I wonder if the managed cure bureaucracy would grant it to poor people if a treatment becomes available.
Which is another reason why I am sympathetic to James Hughes as he is strongly committed to fulfilling social justice. Treatment and enhancements should be available to everyone!
Hughes egalitarianism would break the bank--and for mostly a pipedream.
For the unitiated, Hughes is a transhumanist and author of Citizen Cyborg who wants the government to pay for genetic engineering of progeny, nanotech insertions, uploading minds into computers and the like. He also wants to genetically engineer a chimp to talk in order to bust human exceptionalism.
Thanks for stopping mby HellKaiserRyo.
Hell Kaiser Ryo, Kaiser Ryo, Ryo Marufuji, Zane Truesdale, whatever...
But how do you envision the post-human future?
I do not have Citizen Cyborg on me, but Hughes quoted your stereotypical description of transhumanist aspirations: two-tiered society of naturals and post-humans. Hughes, however, believes such a scenario should be surmounted even at enormous costs. Such a world is not a utopia, but a perfect medium for the proliferation of hatred and envy.
I do accept your criticism of transhumanism when you ask the rhetorical question of why transhumanists seek brain power, physical ability, but not the predilection to love more. However, if an embryo becomes eugenically enhanced, it should be required that their capacity to be empathetic, egalitarian, and universal becomes augmented too.
I have seen SiCKO, and I was shocked with the insurance companies idee fixe for profits. Of course, there are other examples of human misconduct, and I often watch Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes to divert my attention away from our "sinful" nature. I NOW understand the need to augment those human characteristics too. Humans are evolutionarily programmed to seek positional goods and this often causes people to be apathetic regarding the consequences of their own actions to other people. Eliminating these tendacies would obviate much suffering and pain. These people might be the offspring of the rich, but they will have the propensity to actively seek social justice and eliminate poverty so the next generation can experience the eudaemonic state of transhumanity.
P.S. I am not perfect and I am not the paragon of empathy though. It would help me to have those augmentations too so I could be empathetic with uplifted chimps, dolphins, and elephants.
I must add this:
I have read Hughes book. It wasn't an efflugent epiphany or a road to Damacus experience; I already hold most of his views on transhumanism (especially the view that eugenics and egalitarianism can be synonomous). However, Hughes is NOT a eugenicist mainly because eugenics has the connotation of promoting selective breeding and racism. I have been accused of promoting those agendas (unfairly) when I advocated germinal choice technologies though. However, like Hughes, I am most certainly not a racist (as we oppose human racism and after reading CC, I am contemplating on becoming a vegetarian).
In addition, I have searched this blog, and I found a poster called "Simon Young" who objurgates Hughes and has a society solely to castigate him. On his website, he dislikes Hughes proposal of funded global eugenic enhancement programs and morality chips. Without those proposals, how do we eliminate the putative two-tiered society. However, I must add that such a society exists today; we are merely innured to it.
Again, this might be off topic, but we should wonder how future technologies will affect equality and social justice. Getting back to the topic, will the poor benefit from this?
You have a too constrained view of eugenics. Hughes is no racist and transhumanism isn't racist. But it is eugenics in that it accepts the pernicious notion that some human lives have greater value and moral importance than other human lives, and it denies the intrinsic equal moral worth of all humans. Personhood theory, a key component of transhumanism, may not discriminate based on race, but it certainly does based on cognitive capacity.
HKR: I don't envision a post human future. It won't happen, other that what could happen naturally over a million years.
There will never be uplifted elephants. There will never be multiple minds in computer platforms.
Genetic engineering of the kind predicted and yearned for by transhumanists will be too complicated and there will never be implantable on and off switches for gene expression.
Interesting how you see transhumanism promoting your political views. Since it is a wildly individualistic mentality, some other rich person could use the technology to make he/she and his/her children more capitalistic, more ruthless, less empathetic, etc. to win the Darwinistic struggle. Social Darwinism is an ever present threat. Your views of the proper modifications could also impliedly justify forced modifications.
But none of that will happen. My main beef with transhumanism is the values it preaches. I am not at all worried that we will actually seize control of our own evolution in the way that transhumanists predict. I am worried about its spreading the view that some humans have greater value than others.
Every person should benefit from medical advances that help them live their lives to the fullest extent possible, but not at the cost of their common humanity. Transhumanists defy common humanity and make some people seem worthless. The Haves vs. the Have Nots, which is exactly what we would become if some people didn't want to be transhuman. The poor should benefit from medicine that cures. They shouldn't be subjected to something that would make people change the value placed on some lives. Everyone should have value just by virtue of being human.
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