Скачать или смотреть Gerald Fischbach - Controversies around stem cell therapies (60/75)

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Gerald Fischbach (b. 1938) is an American neuroscientist and pioneering researcher. He pioneered the use of nerve cell cultures to study the electrophysiology, morphology and biochemistry of developing nerve-muscle and inter-neuronal synapses. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2023]

TRANSCRIPT: I remember dealing with Christopher Reeve, who had fallen from his horse and severed his spinal cord, but was still quite cognitively intact, and how he kept pleading for stem cell therapy. And eventually left this country and went to, I think Japan, where he did get a transplant. In the end it wasn't very successful, it was very late in his disease. It was a gamble anyhow, but many people spoke out strongly in favor of using stem cells, with some care and caution. Not wholesale invasion of people's bodies and not wholesale use. This was a time when there were many, quote, 'spare embryos', when people were going through in vitro fertilization, and they weren't using all the fertilized eggs. They would experiment until they conceived, sometimes conceived multiple pregnancies. But what do you do with the embryos that are not used? I was advocating using them for therapeutic purposes, but key members of Congress said they have to be destroyed, they can't be used for any therapeutic purpose. I can't remember the names of those congressmen, but their heirs are old, they're still present in Congress.