Positioned at the cutting edge of science, Cell of Cells charts the international race to utilize the stem cell.
From a lab in the Sahara, where one problem is sand in the petri dishes, to an Israeli lab that narrowly escapes a terrorist bomb, stem cells have gone global. Not only are the cells studied in an escalating number of labs―and lands―but they are already being used. In Japan, a respected doctor uses the cells to make small women better endowed. In Connecticut, stem cell technology has created cloned cows that roam the hills displaying eerily identical personalities. In Texas, stem cells rejuvenate dying hearts. In China, clinics offer stem cells to patients suffering from everything from paralysis to brain trauma."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Four books reflect on the most operatic field in science WHY does embryonic stem-cellresearch cause such dramas? These books propose two perspectives. Three journalists--Eve Herold, Seth Shulman and Cynthia Fox--each suggest that this is a new topic that has been hijacked by a small group of political hotheads in America. By contrast, Hannah Landecker, ananthropologist at Rice University, Texas, charts 60 years of tissue-culture science. Over this period cells gradually came to live free from bodies, then experiments conjured them bit by bit into freezable, mass-produced objects and eventually into chimeras with parts from more than one species. Together, the two perspectives explain why all things stem cell slap the layman in the face, and why his shock bewilders many a scientist. Embryonic stem cells clump together as a tiny and distinct blob inside fluid-filled balls called blastocysts. That is what embryos look like when they are between five and seven days old. To conduct experiments on embryonic stem cells, scientists extract the clump from its blastocyst (destroying the rest of the embryo in the process), and then keep the stem cells separately in Petri dishes. Doing so maintains each stem cell's potential to develop into any type of cell in the human body by removing it from the chemical signals of other cells that would otherwise prompt specialisation. Alone in their Petri dishes, embryonic stem cells are primed for anything, making them unique tools for research and therapy. They divide and divide, forming populations of identical copies of themselves known as lines. It is the blastocyst destruction in this process that ideologues perceive as morally reprehensible. By equating it to killing babies they entangle the science in thepolitics of abortion. Ms Herold argues strongly against such views. Her book points out that giving individual rights to a blastocyst is problematic. At that early stage, embryos can split to form twins or triplets. Or pairs of blastocysts can fuse and develop into a normal baby, who grows into a healthy adult. Ms Herold also points out a number of inconsistencies. Federal funding of stem-cell research has been withdrawn as a result of pressure by people--a minority among taxpayers--who take a moral stand against it. Yet people who disapprove of using animals to conduct medical research still contribute to it through the federal taxes they pay. And why does destroying blastocysts in the name of finding cures evoke such tigerish protests when most fertility clinics have for years routinely disposed of them as medical waste? Using arguments similar to those made by Chris Mooney in "The Republican War on Science", Mr Shulman, by contrast, considers the political misrepresentations of stem-cell science. Just over six months into his presidency, Mr Bush declared on television that he would end federal funding of most stem-cell research. It was his first national television address. Publicly funded work could continue on 60-or-so genetically diverse stem-cell lines, Mr Bush said. But the presidential lines, as they came to be known, numbered about two dozen, not 60, and the immediate effect of the decision left 11,000 frozen American embryos that had been donated for research hanging, quite literally, in liquid nitrogen. Researchers cherish lines of embryonic stem cells. They think delicate chemical husbandry will one day yield a method to grow the cells into replacements for dead and diseased tissue. A human egg, with its nucleus swapped for that of a patient's skin cell, can behave as if it has just been fertilised by a sperm and grow into a blastocyst. The clump of stem cells in the middle of a blastocyst clone could then be coaxed into nerve cells for a patient with Parkinson's disease, or cardiac muscle for a heart-disease patient, without risk of rejection by those patients' immune systems. Ms Fox's book captures the adventures of scientists working towards this medical ambition with a realistic humanity. Hers is less workmanlike than the other books and refreshingly unideological. She tells of Egyptian scientists trying to establish aresearch centre in the midst of suicide-bombings. She describes underground stem-cell clinics in China and a Japanese doctor using the cells to give skinny women bigger bosoms. Away from thepolarised propaganda, these are the many ambitions that stem-cell research is stirring up. In the final chapters of their books Ms Fox and Ms Herold chart the undoing of Hwang Woo-suk, once the global leader in the field, who lied about creating human embryonic stem cells by cloning. Ms Fox's examination of "Hwang-gate" is the more colourful. Mr Hwang's comments encouraged South Korean kindergartens to swap wooden chopsticks for metal ones. The metal variety have more slippery pincers to work with and so provide apparently better training for the stem-cell technicians of the future. The officially titled "Supreme Scientist" also kept more than 60 bank accounts under different names and carried bags of cash between banks to obscure paper trails for his funding. Mr Hwang's fakery damaged the integrity of a science that could ill afford any bad news. Meanwhile, doctrinal activists still sing out their contradictions and exaggerations. Britain, so far one of the least hysterical countries, recently postponed a decision about whether making chimeric cells out of rabbit-egg cytoplasms and human nuclei should be illegal. Tabloid newspapers immediately began commissioning cartoons of Frankenbunnies. Yet few laymen realise that scientists first fused cells from different species as far back as the 1960s, as Ms Landecker describes. In those instances nuclei as well as cytoplasms came together and the hybrid cells made perfectly functioning enzymes that expressed the genetic code of two types of animal. That is much closer to what Mary Shelley imagined than anything British stem-cell researchers are proposing today. The level-headedness that can be gained from historical perspective is the value in reading Ms Landecker'saccount. Unfortunately, though, the signs are that this search for new medicines is becoming ever more operatic. -- The Economist, March 31, 2007
Peopled with quirky characters and crowded with strange and beautiful places, Cell of Cells reads like the best travel writing, but the author doesn't stint on the science, or the politics, of her subject. Cynthia Fox spent years touring the world's stem cell hotspots, staking out labs from Egypt to Israel to Singapore, and peering over the shoulders of scientists and surgeons. Her exhaustive legwork has produced a highly entertaining book.
Dozens of key stem cell scientists get personality profiles, as well as a thorough accounting of their work and thought, including Israel's Shimon Slavin, the bone marrow transplantation pioneer who is now using stem cells to create dual immune systems; Jerry Yang of the University of Connecticut's Center for Regenerative Biology, the first scientist to clone an adult farm animal; and Harvard's Jonathan Tilly, who overturned decades of medical dogma by demonstrating the existence of mammalian oocyte stem cells. We get to know patients treated with stem cells, and are offered a surgeon's-eye view of their operations.Fox's often wry tone is ideal for capturing the excitement, and the hype, that accompany any promising medical advance. Fascinatingly, she was researching the book during the spectacular fall of Seoul National University researcher Hwang Woo Suk, whose reports of making the world's first human cloned stem cells were eventually exposed as fraud. We follow Hwang on his way up, basking in the attention of admirers at international meetings and whisking Fox through his state-of-the art lab. And when the time comes to tell of Hwang's disgrace, Fox does an excellent job of helping the reader keep the characters involved, and their misdeeds, straight. Cell of Cells opens with the words of researcher Susan Fisher: "Science is like a stream of water. It finds a way." And Fox provides us with a compelling account of just what this means in today's world of "presidential lines", Singaporean billions, and scientists as rock stars. Let's hope she brings us along on her next voyage. -- The Lancet, April 21, 2007.
Science journalist Fox traveled to Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Japan, China, Korea, and the United States to talk with scientists, patients, and physicians dealing with stem cells through such work as laboratory research in mice; clinical applications in oncology, cardiovascular medicine, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and cosmetic plastic surgery; and attempts to clone mammoth DNA in Siberia. More is happening in the United States than might be readily apparent, given the ban on federal funding. But other countries are definitely racing to take advantage of U.S. restrictions. The issues are as much political as scientific. The promise of stem cells may never be exactly as hoped for, but some patients are being helped in truly new ways. A glossary with definitions and acronyms of all the varieties of stem cells-e.g., adult, embryonic, human embryonic-would have been helpful, but this is both a good introduction to a topic that isn't going away and a gripping and accessible guide to the ongoing work. Recommended for almost any library. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/05.]-Mary Chitty, Cambridge Healthtech, Needham, MA Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. -- Library Journal
When President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he quickly made it clear that he was not in favor of research on human embryonic stem cells. That August he sealed off access to federal funds for research on all but a few (now suboptimal) lines of human embryonic stem cells. His action not only caused stem cells to become a national political issue but also emboldened any country that wanted to compete with the United States in this research. The global race to establish dominance in a field with enormous scientific, health, and commercial possibilities was on, but with U.S. participants denied federal funding. In Cell of Cells, Cynthia Fox brings her impressive talent as a science writer and journalist to telling the story of this race. The hefty book offers a great read for anyone interested in the topic. Fox makes the story an adventure. She carries us to unlikely places, beginning with a camel ride to the Pyramids with an Egyptian stem cell researcher. She then flies to Israel to meet the scientist with whom ...
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