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Thursday, October 09, 2014

A Cure for Diabetes on the Horizon?

The long-sought advance could eventually lead to new ways to help millions of people with diabetes.

Right now, many people with diabetes have to regularly check the level of sugar in their blood and inject themselves with insulin to keep the sugar in their blood in check. It's an imperfect treatment.

"This is kind of a life-support for diabetics," says Doug Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard Medical School. "It doesn't cure the disease and leads to devastating complications of the disease."

People with poorly controlled diabetes can suffer complications such as blindness, amputations and heart attacks.
If this result holds up under further study, it could be a real cure for diabetes. The implications for the nation's health and the cost of health care is huge. Diabetes cost an estimated $245 billion in 2012, including direct medical costs associated with diabetes and indirect costs such as lost productivity.

But the cost in human misery is incalculable. I have a sister-in-law whose son developed type I diabetes in elementary school. For the next several years her entire life revolved around measuring his blood sugar, planning out everything that that he would eat, and fretting every time he was late coming home from school that he had lapsed into a diabetic coma and lay dying alone.

But, incredibly, there are people who oppose this research:
"If, like me, someone considers the human embryo to be imbued with the same sorts of dignity that the rest of us have, then in fact this is morally problematic," says Daniel Sulmasy, a doctor and bioethicist at the University of Chicago. "It's the destruction of an individual unique human life for the sole purpose of helping other persons."
Embryos are alive, and they contain human DNA, but they are not people: once they have been prepared for in vitro fertilization and frozen, they are just a cluster of cells. Using embryonic cells from these sources to cure diabetes is no less ethical than transplanting the heart from a brain-dead victim of a car accident, or using cadaver ligaments to fix a torn ACL, or cadaver corneas to restore vision in the blind.

If the sentiment that unique human lives should not be destroyed for helping other persons were consistently employed, opponents of embryonic stem cell research might have some moral integrity. But most of the detractors also favor the death penalty, in which a unique human life is destroyed for petty revenge, and want anyone to be free to buy a handgun on demand and to shoot anyone they think might hurt them, and if they mistakenly kill an innocent person believe the shooter should suffer no consequences.

In any case, this will not be the final step in researching a cure for diabetes:
Melton thinks he can also make insulin cells using another kind of stem cell known as an induced pluripotent stem cell, which doesn't destroy any embryos. He's trying to figure out if it works as well, and hopes to start testing his insulin cells in people with diabetes within three years.
The goal for scientists is to figure out how switch a patient's own cells into such a pluripotent stem cell, which means no embryos would be involved. But scientists first have to figure out how stem cells differentiate into insulin cells naturally before they can coax adult cells back into stem cells.

Where do the stem cells whose dignity people like Sulmasy want to protect come from? Embryos that are left over after in vitro fertilization procedures. Embryos that would otherwise have to be destroyed are this very moment piling up by the hundreds of thousands in liquid nitrogen vats at in vitro fertilization clinics.

Does it really make more sense to incinerate those leftover cells, or to use a few of them to find a cure that save millions of people from debilitating and deadly diseases?

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