(a) Pool your existing knowledge of the terms

• ‘stem cell’
• ‘ageing’

Then create a short list of what you think are the motivations for scientific research in the field of medicine.

(b) Now discuss the following key questions:

• What are the potential benefits from the discovery that particular tumour cells can be encouraged to create almost any type of cell or tissue?
• What are the driving forces behind scientific research in the field of medicine?
• What are the factors that lead humans to take part in medical trials of unproven techniques?
• What controversies can arise in a research field where different groups are seeking to be first to reach the same goal?
• How important is it to conduct trials with animals before trials with people?

Activity 2: Too Early to Do It, Too Important Not To?

In the programme, opposing views are expressed about the research trial using stem cells engineered from cancer cells, in this case from a lethal testicular teratocarcinoma. The key issue is whether or not these cells have totally lost their cancerous potential.

GS is Gary Snable of Layton Bioscience, the company carrying out the trials using the stem cells engineered from cancer cells.

IW is Professor Irving Weissman of Stamford University, one of the founders of the entire field of stem cell research and a board member of a stem cell company developing a different approach to using stem cells.

GS: ‘Our focus has been on patients and less on science and so we have taken less time to answer all of the questions that could be asked related to this technology and moved more rapidly to try to help people.’

IW: ‘We need to do really rigorous and precise quantitative experiments so that we’re not going to make mistakes. I think we need to be rigorous when we develop this field. I wouldn’t take it (if I had a stroke). First, I don’t think it would work; second, a teratocarcinoma is a carcinoma. Maybe it would be better for me to live with my stroke.’

GS: ‘We always say that our cells were born on the wrong side of the tracks, you know, when you think about putting tumour cells into the brain it’s one of the dumbest things you could possibly do. But we’ve done a tremendous amount of work and we think that scientifically we can demonstrate with reasonable confidence that the cells have lost their tumour-genicity.’

IW: ‘How do you know, I mean know absolutely, that this cell and its progeny have lost all of the steps in the progression to cancer. Because if you just lose a couple of steps and not all of the steps in the progression, you’re putting a time bomb in which eventually could go through those steps, so I wouldn’t do it with populations and certainly not me.’

GS: ‘That’s the academic mindset that what we’re doing really is too early, as far as the professional would say. It’s too important not to, that’s our attitude. Absolutely too important.’

1. From what you have seen in the programme, create a poster which gives evidence and/or reasons which you think support one or other of these viewpoints.

2. Critically compare your poster with one another group has produced for the opposite viewpoints.

3. Then, as a class, try to reach a consensus — based on the necessarily limited evidence you have — on whether or not the research project should be continued with further volunteers.

Activity 3: Cells That Can ‘Dance to the Tune They Hear’

This is how Richard Rose of CytoTherapeutics Inc describes neural stem cells.

What does he mean by this, and what are the implications if his description is indeed correct?