MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR MEDICINE ADVANCES = ETERNAL YOUTH?

course, it will add to the price of the treatment. Since everybody differs in the immune molecules responsible for the rejection, the changes will have to be done on a person-by-person basis.

In mice it has been demonstrated that in the presence of the appropriate growing factors or proteins, SC differentiate into specific tissues. Among the cells that have been produced are neurons, heart cells, blood-producing cells, etc. Those cells, when injected into adult mice, integrated with no problems in the appropriate tissues, suggesting that its use in medicine is just around the corner. In humans, however, there is the obstacle I mentioned above: the source of SC. Thus, the use of embryonic stem cells in human is not going to happen that soon.

Because of the problem of obtaining SC, Geron Corporation is trying to get them from other types of blastocytes. They are investing millions of dollars using cell fusion technique--the same that was used to clone Dolly--to fuse an enucleated cow cell with a cell from the person whose SC are going to be prepared. They will thus produce a human-cow (cow-human?) hybrid that could be used to obtain SC. The procedure is depicted in Figure IV of the Primer of the National Institutes of Health . According to press reports, the hybrids have divided up to the four-cell stage. However, as you've already guessed, there are serious problems to solve before they can be used in humans

The first one is that it is not known if the hybrids will be viable, since the energy-producing structures--the mitochondria--are in part donated by the cow. It is possible that both systems (human and cow) are not compatible. And in case that they are viable, there is a small but real possibility that they could produce immunological rejection, since there will be cow proteins present in those cells.

The other problems are related to the telomeres' length and the accumulation of mutations in the adult cells, which I discussed in the article about cloning. Briefly, the age of the SC could be the age of the donor cell; thus, it is not known how long they will last and the mutations accumulated during the life of the donor cell could negate the viability of the cells.

The problems that I have mentioned could make you think that the road to eternal youth via SC, embryonic or hybrids,

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