Forever Young; Stem Cell Researchers Hope to Discover Cures for Chronic Diseases. Can They Also Find the Secret to Eternal Youth?

Pacific Sun › August 03, 2009

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[Michael West] and others in the field try to avoid some of the controversy with terminology. Say "embryo" and most of us think "baby." Say "cloning" and we think "cloning babies," human or animal. So West refers to the cell clusters he produces as "pre-embryos," or "blastocysts." And he distinguishes his work from "reproductive cloning" - the cloning of a human or animal - by calling it "therapeutic cloning," which produces only cells and tissues. The technology used in therapeutic cloning is called "nuclear transfer." Take an egg cell, remove the DNA, insert a body cell from the patient and grow it in a dish for 14 days. At this stage of development, the microscopic blastocyst hasn't yet formed any tissue, or even committed to becoming one individual or two. When stem cells are then extracted, they can potentially grow into any kind of tissue the patient needs. That tissue would be genetically identical to the patient. "What do you need? New liver cells? They would be your cells, in the sense that the DNA is your DNA. So we would not expect them to be rejected," says West. "It's a real leap forward in applied gerontology. I'm really excited about that."

West laughs when I pose the question. "I don't know where people come up with these things," he says. "The nuclear transfer we've done on animals costs a whopping $75. It costs that much to get a haircut! Of course, that's just nuclear transfer, that's not making whatever therapy might be needed. But it's not millions of dollars. We're not talking about millionaires getting these therapies and no one else can afford it. Now, if you wanted to use nuclear transfer to regenerate heart muscle today, there is no such therapy available. And if you wanted to hire a scientist to do that, sure, you'd have to pay millions and millions and millions because the technologies aren't in place. But I don't see this therapy as any different than any other standard medical therapy. Of course, it's all driven by volume. The more it's implemented, the more the cost will come down."

One catch is that there's a very high correlation between the activation of telomerase and cancer. "Is that perhaps nature's way of keeping us from living too long?" I ask. "I agree with the concept that if we permanently immortalized all the cells in our body, that probably the downside of that Faustian bargain is going to be you're going to die of cancer in a short period of time," says West. With nuclear transfer, however, the cells aren't permanently immortalized - they're just rejuvenated. Theoretically, we could rejuvenate our cells over and over again, extending our life spans indefinitely. Whether or not that would be a desirable thing is another question, one that West didn't entertain in our conversation. "My sights are set so much lower than that," he says. "I'm not a science fiction buff. I like some science fiction, but I'm really focused on medicine. I'm interested in trying to cure [Parkinson]'s and other diseases."