May You Be Forever Young

The Times Online reports that Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin empire is about to go bio-tech, with a company that stores stem cells for later use.

The Virgin-branded company will be launched next Thursday and is expected to offer parents the chance to put the umbilical blood of their newborn children into cold storage. Scientists believe that future advances in medical technology will use stem cells to cure diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.

The move into stem-cell storage is part of a strategy that Sir Richard is developing to invest in technologies of the future.

Looks to me like a move that will help with mainstream acceptance of some of these ideas.

Via Short Sharp Science via Digg.

The Australian federal government passed legislation last night lifting the ban on embryo cloning for stem cell research purposes, despite the big guns against it.

In a rare conscience vote, the House of Representatives passed the controversial measures despite the Prime Minister urging MPs to vote against the bill because it eroded some of society’s most absolute values.

The new Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, also opposed the legislation, saying it crossed a fundamental ethical threshold by allowing human life to be created for the purpose of scientific experimentation.

The bill allows “for therapeutic cloning, the splicing of skin cells with eggs to produce an embryo from which stem cells - also known as master cells, which are capable of forming all the tissues of the human body - can be taken.”

The NYT reports that there’s a gene that suppresses tumours, but also knocks over stem cells in older people.

Biologists have uncovered a deep link between lifespan and cancer in the form of a gene that switches off stem cells as a person ages.

The critical gene, already well known for its role in suppressing tumors, seems to mediate a profound balance between life and death. It weighs the generation of new replacement cells, required for continued life, against the risk of death from cancer, which is the inevitable outcome of letting cells divide. To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate.

Via Slashdot.

Elite athletes and stem cells aren’t usually found in the same sentence, but apparently some soccer stars are banking stems cells from their newborns’ umbilical blood as a hedge against future damage.

Some leading English soccer players are storing stem cells from their newborn babies as a potential future treatment for their own career-threatening sports injuries, according to a report in the UK Sunday Times newspaper.

Players are freezing the cells taken from the umbilical cord blood of their babies as a possible future cure for cartilage and ligament problems. Stem cells can be used to regenerate damaged organs and tissue because they are the earliest form of cells.

Presumably they have the means and the potential need. Is this the beginning of a trend?