Stem-cell technique rated the top discovery of last year

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE:IN DECEMBER the prestigious international journal, Science,prepared a list of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs in 2008. Top place was awarded to the invention of the technique to create stem cells without the need to destroy embryos.

These artificially created stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, are made by genetically re-programming ordinary adult body cells, eg skin cells.

IPS cells seem to have all the potential of embryonic stem cells as regards eventually producing treatments and cures for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s, while avoiding the ethical problems associated with destruction of human embryos.

Three teams working in Japan and the US made major advances with the IPS cell technique in 2008. Robert Coontz, editor of Science, said the development "opened up a new field of biology almost overnight and holds out hope of life-saving medical advances".

Two years ago scientists successfully transformed adult mice cells into stem cells and, building on this work, spectacular progress was made with humans in 2008. In July 2008, scientists at Harvard took skin cells from an 82-year-old woman with motor neuron disease and transformed them into stem cells, which they then induced to turn into spinal cord nerves. Observing how these nerve cells grow in the laboratory will show how this disease begins and progresses, something that is not possible to observe in the living patient.

Shortly after the Harvard breakthrough another research team made IPS cells from patients with 10 other diseases, including Down’s syndrome, diabetes and muscular dystrophy.

IPS cells will be used initially to model and study the development of various human diseases in the laboratory. This should allow rapid progress in understanding these diseases and will also allow rapid study of the efficacy of various treatments. Inducing IPS cells to reliably differentiate into particular organs/tissues for use in replacing failing/ diseased organs will encounter the same difficulties as is presently being encountered with reliably inducing embryonic stem cells to differentiate along specific lines. This problem will be solved in time and the IPS cell approach should offer cures at that stage.

Using IPS cells as described poses no ethical problems, but the IPS cell field is not immune to ethical problems. It is conceivable that IPS cells could be used in ways which some/many people would find ethically objectionable. For example, in theory I could transform my skin cells into IPS cells and then induce them to form gametes, ie egg cells and sperm cells. I could then fertilise an egg with a sperm to form an embryo and grow the embryo into a baby with the assistance of a surrogate mother, thereby effectively cloning myself. Using a variation of this technique, two male homosexual partners could father a biological child (although not two lesbian partners as they lack a Y chromosome).

SECOND PLACE ON the top-10 scientific breakthroughs for 2008 was awarded for the first direct observation of a planet outside our own solar system. Scientists first indirectly confirmed the existence of such planets in the 1980s by observing gravitationally induced “wobbles” in the stars around which such planets revolve – over 300 “extrasolar” planets have now been observed. In 2008 scientists detected light directly from the planets themselves. It should now be possible to investigate their composition.

The other eight awards in the top-10 were not ranked. They include a promising new tool (a cobalt-phosphorous catalyst) for storing excess electricity generated from intermittent sources like wind and solar energy; a laser microscope that can follow the dance of cells inside a fertilised egg as it grows into an embryo – the researchers could trace the origin of cells that formed specific tissues in the zebrafish fertilised egg; research into brown fat tissue, which burns “bad” white fat to generate heat, shows it is similar to muscle – this may produce new treatments for obesity; a new family of high temperature super-conductors, consisting of iron instead of copper and oxygen compounds, that can carry electricity without resistance; new gene sequencing techniques that are much faster and cheaper and that have allowed the sequencing of new genomes, eg the woolly mammoth; watching proteins at work in the cell and altering its metabolic state; expanding the catalogue of cancer genes; and finally, calculations showing that the standard model in nuclear physics, which describes the visible universe’s particles and interactions, accurately predicts the mass of the proton and the neutron.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that, at the same time as the rest of the world is getting excited about the ethically neutral IPS cell breakthrough and we in Ireland are about to embark for the first time on stem cell research, we decide to start off with the ethically problematic option – embryonic stem-cell research.

William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at University College Cork –

[ http://understandingscience.ucc.ie ]