Stem cell research promising

Stem cell research promising

By Chen Jia and Shan Juan (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-29 07:42

 

BEIJING - After seeing the fastest development worldwide in stem cell research during the past 10 years, China is "on the verge of achieving a breakthrough", says a top scientist in the field.

 

 

Zhou Qi, chief scientist with the stem cell research project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), spoke after the academy chose his area of expertise for significant attention.

 

He said Chinese scientists are expecting a major scientific breakthrough to be made within the next decade.

 

"We are now close to the day when we will be able to hail a breakthrough in this important technology," Zhou told China Daily during an exclusive interview.

 

He said China has already succeeded in creating a "stem cell line up to clinical standards", which signifies a major stride toward clinical treatment. 

 

"China needs five to 10 years to shift from basic research to clinical application and another 10 years to realize large-scale clinical application," he said.

 

"If there are any science projects that could win China a Nobel Prize during the next 10 years, the most likely candidate is its stem cell research."

Going forward, the priority will be to focus on stem cell regulation, core mechanisms for stem-cell therapies and standardized applications of stem cells, Zhou said.

 

Scientists believe various kinds of stem cells - so-called because they are the foundation of all human cells - will eventually be used to treat deadly and debilitating ailments such as heart attacks, strokes, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, liver failure and even blindness.

 

Zhou described China's progress after the CAS designated stem cell and regenerative medicine research as one of the country's eight "strategic trailblazing research projects". Others among the eight include research projects into nuclear fission, space science and clean energy.

 

At the annual national meeting of the CAS, which ended on Thursday, the academy's vice-president, Bai Chunli, said the priority now will be to remove bottlenecks holding back China's stem cell research.

Bai said the CAS will establish a world-class research platform and base for stem cell and regenerative medicine research. 

 

Stem cell research promising

The platform will incorporate the four core research centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Kunming and the resources of 17 research institutions around the country.

The research center in Beijing is responsible for project materials and organ construction; the Shanghai-based center focuses on establishing stem-cell regulation; the Guangzhou-based center focuses on biology and medicine and the center in Kunming is devoted to clinical animal experiments.

Zhou said China has achieved the fastest development in stem cell research of any country during the past 10 years. The number of research papers published by Chinese scientists about stem cell research is the fifth largest worldwide.

"But our international influence has not ranked among the first level and we are facing international concern about our lack of stem cell research regulations," he said.

 

Despite the fact that scientists such as Zhou are at the pre-clinical stage of their research, that has not stopped some institutions from offering untried treatments to desperate patients, despite the fact that such treatments are supposed to be unavailable.

 

Patients with incurable conditions have been visiting the country to receive experimental stem cell treatments not available in countries such as the United States.

 

Stem cell treatments are currently available in China for the treatment of such ailments as spinal cord injuries, leukemia and Parkinson's disease.

Many of the treatments are being offered thanks to a legal loophole and are available even though experts have warned they have not been proven to be either effective or safe.

 

Deng Haihua, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, said the influx of foreigners traveling to China for such treatments will be slowed with new regulations.

 

Currently, "it's kind of a gray area and not well regulated," he conceded.

Luc Noel, an expert with the World Health Organization in Switzerland, said the WHO is discouraging such medical tourism.

 

"Given the high potential risks, the World Health Organization does not recommend medical tourists travel abroad to receive stem cell therapy," he said.

 

Internationally, regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies are deemed to be at the pre-clinical stage and, in limited cases, are the subject of clinical research, Noel said.

 

Zhou said research into stem cell treatments is important in China because "classical medical treatments based on medicine and surgery cannot meet soaring clinical needs".

 

The number of Chinese people suffering from organ defects caused by trauma, inherited problems, disease and aging is the largest in the world, he said.

 

Zhou said China would like to cooperate with international qualified repositories of stem cell material in the near future.

"The United States is once again pioneering basic research and the clinical application of stem cells," he said.

 

The US had, under the George W. Bush administration, banned the use of federal funding for new lines of embryonic stem cell research but President Barack Obama reversed that decision.

 

The US Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the commercial use of any treatments using embryonic or fetal stem cells.

 

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Comments: 2
  • #1

    Anass (Wednesday, 18 July 2012 02:20)

    Nice post dude

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    sex tel (Tuesday, 17 January 2017 10:55)

    wyleźć

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A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

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2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

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Tue

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The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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