Germany pulls ahead with Stem Cell Research

[Thetaloops]

Stem cells from fat used to repair girl's skull

Doctors report damaged bone grew back after surgeryThe Associated Press
Updated: 12:46 p.m. ET Dec. 17, 2004Surgeons have used stem cells from fat to help repair skull damage in a 7-year-old girl in Germany, in what’s apparently the first time such fat-derived cells have been exploited to grow bone in a human.


The girl had been injured two years before in a fall, which destroyed several areas of her skull totaling nearly 19 square inches, the German researchers reported.

Other surgeons had failed to correct the defects, and the girl wore a protective helmet. Her brain could sometimes be seen pulsating through the missing areas of her skull.

But several weeks after the stem-cell surgery, she was able to leave her helmet behind, the researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery. The skull is now smooth to the touch, the missing parts replaced by thin but solid bone, said Dr. Hans-Peter Howaldt of the Justus-Liebig-University Medical School in Giessen, Germany. The child was not identified.

Howaldt, who performed the surgery last year, said the damage was too extensive to be repaired with bone grafts from her body. He said the hope was that if bits of the child’s bone were mixed with stem cells, the cells would turn into bone-building cells that would create additional bone.

That appears to have happened, Howaldt said in a telephone interview Thursday.

“I cannot prove that our success comes from the stem cells alone,” he said, “but the combination of the two things simply worked.”<br>


Embryonic stem cells used in research most often come from embryos left over after in vitro fertilization procedures.
Step One: An egg is fertilized by a sperm in a lab dish.



Step Two: The fertilized egg begins to divide and develop into an embryo. About five days later, the embryo becomes a blastocyst -- a hollow ball of about 100 cells. The inner cells are the embryonic stem cells.




Step Three: Stem cells are removed from the blastocyst and cultured in the laboratory where they theoretically can multiply indefinitely.




Step Four: By adding and removing certain proteins, scientists can coax the cells to develop into new heart, bone, nerve or other cells to treat diseases.



Assisted reproductive technology: Fertility treatments that involve a laboratory handling eggs or embryos, such as in vitro fertilization.
Blastocyst: A preimplantation embryo of 30 to 150 cells.

Differentiation: The process by which early unspecified cells acquire the features of specific cells such as heart tissue, liver or muscle.

Embryo: The earliest stage of development from the single cell to implantation in the uterus.

Embryonic stem cell: A cell from an embryo that has the potential to become a wide variety of specialized cell types.

In vitro: Done outside the body.

In vivo: Done within the living body.

Tissue or cell culture: Growth of tissue in a laboratory dish for experimental research.




Source: Associated Press, MSNBC research • Print this



'A very big deal'
In August, other German doctors reported growing a jaw bone in a man’s back muscle and transplanting it to his mouth to fill a gap left by cancer surgery. The researchers used bone marrow, which also contains stem cells, to help grow the bone. But it’s not clear whether the stem cells were responsible for the bone growth.

So Roy C. Ogle of the University of Virginia, an expert in skull reconstructive surgery who has been studying bone regeneration from fat-derived cells, said he considered the new report to be the first indicating that any kind of stem cell had been used to grow bone in a human.

“It is a very big deal,” said Ogle, who called the study a landmark.

He agreed that the study didn’t prove that stem cells provided the new bone. But it also indicates that the implanted cells did no harm, which has been a concern with using stem cells in people, he said.

Ogle said many surgeons would have augmented the child’s bone with a mineral paste or collagen instead of stem cells. Howaldt said he believes it’s better to use the body’s own tissue.


Howaldt and his colleagues treated the skull in the same operation that recovered bone from the girl’s pelvis and about 1.5 ounces of fat tissue from her buttocks. The bone was milled into chips about one-tenth of an inch long and placed in the missing areas of the skull. Then surgeons added the stem cells to the bone chips. The cells had been extracted from the girl’s fat in a laboratory while surgeons prepared the girl’s skull.

Howaldt said the bone chips appeared to instruct the stem cells to make more bone. While the new bone should grow as the child grows, she’s old enough that her skull won’t grow much more anyway, he said.

© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Swamp Gas]

The Europeans are way ahead of the U.S. in just about every category...Science, The Arts, Civilian Space travel, anti-war sentiment, and taking care of it's people.

Here's an interesting story on the Butt-Ugly Bay bridge vs the new World's Tallest Bridge in France.





Come See Our Hideous Slab
As the world swoons over France's soaring beauty of a bridge, S.F. gets slapped with an eyesore

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, December 17, 2004


And did you hear the one about how those gul-dang baguette-sucking antiwar French just completed work on this astounding new bridge, a soaring, airy, delicate thing erected in southern France, and it's all over the international press and the French people are justifiably proud and even the venerable Le Monde has deemed the new Millau bridge a "work of art," and the amazing pictures are being featured everywhere, for good reason?
And you look at the photos and see the breathtakingly elegant architecture (it was built by the same company that did the Eiffel Tower) and you read about the bridge's world-record height and its classy designer, renowned British architect Norman Foster, the man who also designed the Millennium Bridge in London and who believes, crazily, that "works of man should fuse with nature," and his bridge is already being hailed as an instant landmark.

The Millau. Its pillars poke the clouds and its design inspires the spirit and it will surely be a major tourist attraction for decades to come -- a fact that, of course, means little to most Americans, because most red-blooded patriots never venture past the Wal-Mart on the outskirts of their home state. But still.

And if you care at all about industrial design and the splendor of pure function and of humankind's aspirations toward anything resembling ideals of grace and simplicity and beauty, you take one look and you can only go, whoa.

And then you get to spin right around just in time to have your face slapped by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a giant slab of a B-grade actor and C-grade politician who is right this minute advocating throwing a giant slab across S.F. Bay and calling it the new Bay Bridge redesign, when anyone who looks at the artist rendering just sort of feels this nasty tightening in their colon and they go, oh Jesus, what the hell is wrong with us?

Simple questions, really. Why can't we have something like the Millau? Are we really that far gone? Are American-bred notions of imagination and creativity and inspired beauty really that dead?


Are we really all that twisted into little knots of bureaucracy and fiscal congestion and small-hearted egomania and impotent political correctness and a numb and tasteless BushCo-brand blandness like a national disease? You already know the answer.

It is to be an ugly viaduct thing, S.F.'s new bridge approach, a flat, featureless "freeway on stilts" that looks like something regurgitated from an abandoned East L.A. aqueduct, a long sloping ramp of constipation-gray concrete without a design feature or a graceful note or a soaring architectural anything to its name.

This is the current plan now grunted forth by Arnie. It is supposed to lop $300 million or so off the ridiculously high cost of the current new Bay Bridge plan, costs that have exploded to upward of a staggering $5 billion for some unknowable Caltrans reason and is now a good time to mention the real kicker about the Millau? How France's gorgeous and epic 1.6-mile span cost only $550 million? Shhh.

And sure, the Bay Area has seismic issues and environmental issues and a difficult terrain that the Millau might not have faced, but is it really 10 times more difficult and expensive? Is it really so utterly impossible, given the current social climate, to obtain designs at once visionary and affordable? Maybe you already know the answer to that one, too.

There is no longer any choice. Arnie's Slab Plan is the almost-foregone conclusion now advocated by Bay Area politicos, and many now say that if we want any damn bridge to be completed anytime in the next decade, we have to stop bickering over design and accept Arnie's butt-ugly plan and get down to the real business of who's gonna pay for the damn thing. What fun.

And by the way, even if we go back to the original plan, we're still stuck with a generic, symmetrical, single-tower lump that bores the seagulls and induces yawns in tourists and that could exist in any city in the world.

How far we seem from a potent sense of creativity and unity and spirit, even in landmark-happy S.F. How hugely separated we seem to be in this country from radical notions of pride and world-class industrial design and a spirit of originality and imagination, of anything like the visionary forces that gave birth to the Millau.

Is it all just financial? Is it all just because we can't afford fancy designs? Bull. After all, most Bay Areans would rather argue about how to fund a visionary, landmark architectural "work of art" than a tepid eyesore of a bridge that doesn't even inspire you to want to jump off of it.

Here's a question: Do you maybe recall back in 1998, when they held that big international design contest for the new Bay Bridge? Do you maybe remember any of those lovely and often radical designs, one of which was deemed, if I recall, the Sail? Or maybe it was the Wing?

And the Sail/Wing consisted of a single giant support beam jutting out from the center of the span at what I think was about a 60-degree angle, just leaning out over the water, with support cables running from the length of the span out to the beam, and it looked like, well, a giant sail tilted on its side and it was absolutely gorgeous and sort of breathtaking and would have made us world famous and proud of our bridges and our ingenuity and our sense of beauty and grace and international integrity all over again.

Do you remember? No? Doesn't matter.

Because the Sail/Wing and every other truly interesting design proposed during that contest was almost immediately nixed, killed, sneered at as too controversial or too radical or too expensive (yeah right), and because some bureaucrats and citizens' groups didn't like them and because no one in City Hall or Sacramento had any sense of leadership or vision (well, except for maybe Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, but he was relatively powerless) and, because you can't please everyone, we ended up pleasing no one. And here we are.

Screw it. Let them build the Slab. It's too late, anyway. It will be our own private joke. It will be our memento of a dreary and war-torn time. Tourists will look at it and skip the photo. We will look at it and go, oh yeah, that was from a time when San Francisco and California and the nation as a whole were all mired neck deep in war and gluttony and bitter divisiveness and fiscal abuse, and no one seemed to give a damn and if you did you were considered a traitor.

And the City was broke largely because the state was broke and the state was broke largely because the wildly irresponsible and reckless BushCo imbeciles ran us all into the goddamn fiscal ground and gutted the value of the dollar and put our country a trillion dollars in debt, and they just laughed like drunk hyenas the whole time as they cashed in their oil portfolios and mapped out bombing routes in Iran.

It will be our soulless and generic little landmark. It will stand for decades to come and we will say, sure it's ugly. Sure it's a giant concrete slab. Sure it's graceless and uninspired and brutish and an architectural embarrassment and sure it is, perhaps more than anything else, one massive and rather humiliating missed opportunity.

Hey, that's America in a nutshell, sweetheart. That's the Bush era, right there. You want grace and beauty and dreams all coupled with soaring notions of hope and progress? Move to France, hippie.

[Swamp Gas]

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/12/20/MNGRAAEL4B1.DTL


Germany shines a beam on the future of energy
Nation gambles on amped-up push for renewable power
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, December 20, 2004


Muhlhausen, Germany -- A solar-power project built by a Berkeley company may point Germany toward a pollution-free future.

Set in the heart of Bavarian farmland, the 30-acre facility went online earlier this month, becoming the biggest solar energy plant in the world.

For the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the Muhlhausen solar farm represents a gamble that Germany, the world's third biggest economy, can replace its principal energy sources -- coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear power -- with clean, safe and renewable alternatives.

"There's a huge amount of opportunity here in Germany because the government has created a system that encourages large installations," said Thomas Dinwoodie, chief executive officer of PowerLight Corp. of Berkeley, which built and operates the Muhlhausen facility and two other solar parks nearby.

Germany's approach is being closely watched by officials in California and elsewhere as a possible model for developing renewable energy.

PowerLight's three Bavarian solar parks, consisting of 57,600 silicon-and- aluminum panels, will generate 10 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power 9,000 German homes. The amount of electricity produced is much less than power plants fueled by coal or natural gas, but with very low operating costs, the solar project is expected quickly to turn a profit while emitting zero pollution. Schroeder's left-of-center Social Democrat-Green coalition has turned Germany into the world leader in renewable energy since it took office in 1998. Billions of dollars have been spent on wind and solar projects, and Schroeder, in a politically risky move, has sharply increased taxes on petroleum products in an attempt to reduce consumption of conventional fuels.

The campaign accelerated a year ago when Germany enacted a law forcing electric utility companies -- and, ultimately, all electricity users -- to pay higher rates to businesses or individuals who generate solar or wind energy and feed it back into the grid. With this guarantee of revenue, solar panels have become commonplace on new German houses and huge new windmills are a typical sight in rural areas, especially in the more windy north.

"This is part of our commitment as a government, to make Germany the world leader in alternative energy and in taking action against global warming, " said Juergen Trittin, Germany's environment minister. "We are willing to do what is necessary."

The country is now the No. 1 world producer of wind energy, with more than 16,000 windmills generating 39 percent of the world total, and it is fast closing in on Japan for the lead in solar power. Wind and solar energy together provide more than 10 percent of the nation's electricity, a rate that is expected to double by 2020.

It has become a profitable business, too, with about 60,000 people employed in the design and manufacture of wind and solar energy equipment.

Energy analysts and industry executives alike say that California, which leads other U.S. states in renewable energy development, is looking to Germany as a laboratory of what works and what doesn't. Yet even Germany's chief booster of renewable energy warns that the lessons are mixed.

"This has a political cost," said Trittin, who cheerfully admitted in an interview that he is "probably one of the less popular" politicians in the country.

According to recent public opinion polls, close to 80 percent of Germans support the government's strategy of promoting renewable energy sources and its staunch advocacy of the Kyoto Protocol's obligations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Public support is markedly less, however, for the other key element of the government's anti-oil program. Under a separate law enacted in 1999, gasoline taxes are increasing by 3 euro cents per liter per year -- about 15 U.S. cents per gallon -- provoking howls from commuters and truckers.

"The German people broadly support alternative energy, but Trittin has pushed the limits of that support," said Michael Kohlhaas, an energy policy analyst at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. Increasing numbers of Germans are even finding the ever-present windmills an eyesore.

"Opposition to wind farms is growing fast, but none of the major political parties are prepared to listen to voters' concerns," said Hans- Joachim Mengel, a political science professor at Berlin Free University. "They are ideologically committed to wind as a source of alternative energy and don't want it questioned."

In September, Mengel ran a quixotic independent campaign for state assembly in Brandenburg, on the Berlin outskirts. Running on an anti-wind platform, he beat all expectations by winning 19 percent of the vote.

"A few people make money from (wind power), but everybody else gets nothing," he said. "Why should I sacrifice my landscape so that Herr Mueller down the road can make money by leasing out his land for a wind park?"

Germany's use of alternative energy puts it far in front of environmentally conscious California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a vocal proponent of renewable fuel sources. On Dec. 13, California officials set a goal of 1 million buildings in California powered by solar energy by 2018, including half of all new homes. They did not offer details of how the target will be achieved, though officials said they are considering a charge on electricity bills to pay for up to $1 billion for investment credits to solar manufacturers and for an extension of existing income and property tax credits to homeowners who install solar panels.

Increasing numbers of U.S. businesses have joined environmental groups to push President Bush to embrace alternative energy. Instead, the administration has blocked attempts in Congress to adopt specific goals and timelines for increasing renewable sources and has emphasized oil, natural gas and coal exploration.

"Germany's policy is a more mixed and balanced strategy than to look under the sands of the Arabian peninsula," Trittin said, referring to U.S. reliance on Persian Gulf oil. "This is more the European way. There are 6 billion people on this globe. You will not solve our need for energy with fossil fuels or nuclear plants. You will do it by substituting with renewables. "

But Germany's experience suggests that the profit motive is the key -- alternative energy sectors grow fastest when users are able to make money on the energy they generate.

A law that has been in effect for a year stipulates that the nation's electric utility companies must buy all wind and solar power generated by residential, commercial and industrial users at a price 10 times higher than the rate that users are charged for the electricity provided by the utilities from coal, nuclear or natural gas plants.

Enticed by the guarantee of selling electricity at 46 euro cents (about 62 U.S. cents) per kilowatt hour for the next 20 years, as stipulated by the new rule, Berkeley's PowerLight Corp. needed no further prompting. CEO Dinwoodie went to a large investment bank in Frankfurt, Deutsche Structured Finance, and got a $65 million investment.

"The financers don't care about solar per se, and that's why this system works here," said Dinwoodie. "This is conventional financing, this is the market itself working. There is no government spending." Dinwoodie is so bullish on Germany that he opened an office in the small city of Regensburg, near the Muhlhausen project, and his wife and two children moved from Berkeley in August to live with him there. He now is busy lining up new solar investment projects around the country.

Under California utility regulations, by contrast, users are only able to draw their bills down to zero, with no profit possible. As a result, solar installations are small and large commercial facilities like PowerLight's Muhlhausen farm are impossible.

"California at one time led the world in renewable energy development, but we gave up that role two decades ago," said Paul Gipe, a wind policy expert from Kern County. Gipe is currently in Canada as acting executive director of the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association, working with the provincial government to enact a German-style system of preferential pricing for renewable energy.

"Germany has picked up that banner and is running with it," Gipe said. "Germany now has the manufacturing jobs that California once had. If we want these manufacturing jobs, then we'd better look at what the Germans are doing, and the simplest thing to do is simply translate the German policy into English and put it into effect."

Other analysts are more cautious.

Mark Levine, director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that California has gone further than Europe in making its factories and commercial buildings more energy-efficient, yet Germany leads the state by far in wind and solar. "Germany's policies are not going to be a direct model for California because our political situations are so different," he said. "But Europe has taken major steps recently, and Germany most of all, largely because of its commitment under Kyoto. People are watching carefully."

[Thetaloops]

It would seem that Germany has learned it's lesson about war and world conquest. They are putting their money and energy into the future. Building a better place in the world that is more sensible, instead of destroying the past, present and future like the US and Britian are doing in Iraq and where ever else they plan to take over and suck dry.