Word: fetal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While so far only this bypass procedure has received the FDA's blessing, trials are under way to robotically repair the heart's valves, place pacemaker wires and stabilize irregular heartbeats. In Canada, a rival system from Computer Motion in Santa Barbara, Calif., is being tested for fetal-heart surgery. Douglas Boyd, who heads the National Center for Advanced Surgery and Robotics in London, Ont., believes that robots' minimally invasive techniques could vastly improve fetal surgery's current 90% failure rate, which he says is primarily a result of the trauma placed on the womb by traditional surgical techniques. "Robots...
...lifers are using the study in their ongoing war against fetal-cell research of any kind. Says Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas: "Not only are you destroying one human being [the fetus], you may be destroying two." A few scientists called for such operations to be halted immediately, and some nonscientists wondered why they had ever been done in the first place...
...answer is that Parkinson's is such a devastating disease that sufferers and their families are desperate for a cure. Drugs can alleviate the symptoms, but not retard the progressive death of brain cells. That's why fetal-cell transplants were first proposed and why some doctors were already performing the operation on patients who could afford it (cost: as much as $40,000). The researchers in the controversial study were doing what scientists are supposed to do: conduct a rigorous study to determine whether a treatment actually works...
...that results are in, some press accounts have breathlessly painted the episode as an unmitigated disaster. But that's not really true. Knowing that fetal cells can grow successfully in a patient's brain is a major step forward. And, says Dr. Thomas Freeman, a Parkinson's expert from the University of South Florida, "it's naive to think that you can do a medical intervention in people with end-stage disease and not have complications...
...even proponents agree that fetal cells alone won't eradicate Parkinson's--if only because there aren't nearly enough fetuses to do the job. Scientists are looking instead to stem cells, unspecialized cells that eventually turn into every tissue in the body. "That," says Dr. Gerald Fischbach, former head of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, "could be a renewable resource." Unfortunately, stem cells are most easily harvested from human embryos, and that means the controversy underlying the Parkinson's surgery isn't about to go away...