The full post is here:
The patient is a woman who has been paraplegic from an accident for more than 19 years. (Complete paraplegia of the 10th thoracic vertebra.) She had surgery and also an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells. Note the stunning benefits: “The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation. On post operative day (POD) 7, motor activity was noticed and improved gradually in her lumbar paravertebral and hip muscles. She could maintain an upright position by herself on POD 13. From POD 15 she began to elevate both lower legs about 1 cm, and hip flexor muscle activity gradually improved until POD 41.” It goes on from there in very technical language.
This is an amazing development. It’s the type of progress everyone has been hoping would come from stem cell research. However, here are the most important points to be made — first of all, the researchers used adult stem cells. Like it or not, disagree with it or not, the stance of the pro-life groups who have been adamantly opposed to embryonic stem cell research is now vindicated by the fact that these researchers were able to use umbilical cord stem cells. I have personally felt that we should be willing to use embroyonic stem cells since it seemed to be the most promising means for netting results. I felt that it was not defensible to delay the progress researchers could make by not using every resource possible — including embryonic stem cells. That said, it sounds like the need for embryonic stem cells may have been overstated — but only time will tell, especially as other researchers begin to expand on this sucessful effort.
That said, I have to admit that it now appears that meaningful progress can be made without using embryonic stem cells — which is big news in and of itself.