

Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security - colinprince
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/06/19/155301289/med-student-rescues-body-part-from-airport-security

======
andos
I was reading this like any other ordinary story. Then I got to this part:

    
    
        Amazingly, he doesn't do transplants anymore. 
        Tracheas, he has decided, can be regenerated 
        from scratch, using stem cells.
    

It brought tears to my eyes. No amount of bad news can weaken the beauty
contained in that little paragraph. This made my day, really.

~~~
timr
There are _so many_ angles to this story that involve the tension between the
forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the
world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're
still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing
consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to
destroy.

Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in
a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong
movement to _kill_ that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time,
nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because
it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of
human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.

Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone
who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague,
supernatural objections.

(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from _adult_ stem
cells, not _embryonic_ stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference
-- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any
given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)

~~~
Turing_Machine
These aren't embryonic stem cells. No one has a problem with adult stem cells
(well, I suppose the folks who refuse all forms of medical treatment might).

~~~
timr
_"No one has a problem with adult stem cells."_

Untrue. There are/were plenty of groups who object to _all_ stem cell
research. Embryonic cells are just the most controversial segment. (Consider
this thought experiment: take a fully differentiated human cell, and transform
it such that it is capable of generating a embryo. Do you think this won't
generate objections on religious grounds?)

The heart of the debate is that our knowledge is pushing relentlessly against
the darkness of superstition, and that makes some people uncomfortable -- just
as every scientific advancement has made people uncomfortable. We're just in a
sad period where these people have greater influence over our society's
decisions.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"There are/were plenty of groups who object to all stem cell research."

Can you name a few? Thanks. To the best of my knowledge, no major religious
group opposes adult stem cell research.

~~~
timr
How about bishops in the Catholic Church?

<http://www.lifenews.com/2006/08/23/bio-1727/>

 _'Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an expert
on bioethics issues, told the Associated Press the research "raises more
ethical questions than it answers."..."It is widely believed that one cell of
a very early embryo may separate and become a new embryo, an identical twin,"
Doerflinger told the Associated Press.'_

Here's another response to the same experiment, which better captures the root
of the objections:

<http://cathnews.acu.edu.au/608/140.html>

 _'"Regardless of the speculated benefits, no human being, particularly the
most vulnerable, should be treated as raw material which we can manipulate and
manufacture," Mr O'Gorman said.'_

~~~
Turing_Machine
That has nothing whatsoever to do with adult stem cells.

Did you miss the part that was talking about embryos or what?

Update: try this
[http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.ph...](http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=43670)

If you think the Catholic Church is opposed to adult stem cell research,
you're simply misinformed.

~~~
timr
It has everything to do with them: there's no such thing as an "adult" stem
cell. There are only differentiated and undifferentiated cells, and
"embryonic" is a useful description only insofar as it describes the source of
origin of an established cell line. The techniques that those quotes were
concerning don't destroy embryos -- they turn differentiated cells into
undifferentiated cells -- but that's enough to trigger the objections.

Said another way, there's _no fundamental reason_ that "adult" stem can't be
converted to an "embryonic" state. And the quotes above illustrate that once
you do that, you run afoul of the opponents. The religious groups don't want
to prohibit "embryonic" stem cell research; they want to prevent anyone from
doing any sort of science that they perceive to be in violation of their
notion of human-being-ness. Science doesn't support the distinctions that
they're making, and therefore, the conflict is unresolvable.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Now you're just arguing for the purpose of arguing.

The official doctrine of the Catholic Church supports adult stem cell
research. That's just a fact. Sorry.

------
ajb
The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood
for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than
good.

Suppose there is a drug which prevents heart attacks, but due to side effects,
rare reactions, or just plain error, causes damage to a small proportion of
people. If you have a 50% chance of a heart attack, taking it would be a good
bet. But giving the same drug to everyone would be a medical disaster. Any
treatment you give to a broad population had better be extraordinarily safe.
The rarer the threat you are trying to address, the more easily you can do
more harm than good.

Terrorism is rare.

~~~
sausagefeet
I think there is a flip side of it too:

Fliers need to make it clear that they are OK with the fact that if they want
to be treated better, security will not catch all security risks.

~~~
ajb
Yes and no. Think of it this way: if you have a graph of security against
cost, there is a line which represents possible tradeoffs of best security for
a given cost. You are saying, we need to think about where we want to be on
the line. _I don't think we are even on the line_.

------
iwwr
We are starting to see glimpses of the hidden costs of airport security.
Consider just that by discouraging flight, more people end up dead on the
(vastly more) insecure roads.

------
jgamman
i think there's a lesson here in risk management. the obviously brilliant
doctor failed to put care and attention into the mundane delivery part of the
process. there are no small details. Jet Star is a low price, zero premium
service. for the cash/time invested, they should have being going business
class with a premium airline, a signed piece of letterhead and if possible,
hired an airline rep to walk them in one airport and out the other. someone's
life hung on the balance of a student knowing a pilot...

~~~
beambot
To quote, " _That done, Birchall's team booked the only direct flight from
Bristol to Barcelona, operated by an airline called easyJet._ " Thus, your
"business class with a premium airline" doesn't (appear) to have been
feasible.

~~~
teamonkey
Bristol is only 2 hours drive from London.

------
vacri
Strange that the article title refers to a bit of high drama rather than "we
can make replacement tracheas from scratch now!"

~~~
marquis
It is a sad day that speaks volumes about the world we live in now, that we
encounter an article on such an important, ground-breaking topic, and it's
titled 'Airport security refuses transport'.

~~~
mikeash
It's possible to have multiple news articles concentrating on different
aspects of the same event. I bet there are other articles out there that
concentrate on the medical research. Not everything out there has to cover
only the most important stuff.

~~~
saraid216
A quick search through Google News says those hypothetical articles are rather
hard to find.

~~~
mikeash
Try searching 2008, when the procedure actually occurred, and you'll find
quite a few.

------
tokenadult
Previous submission, no comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135224>

(Neither this nor the previous submission submitted the canonical URL, which
helps the HN duplicated detector do its job.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111691>

~~~
catch23
I hadn't seen it before. Reposts are not necessarily bad, if there are no
comments, nobody saw the post, thus a repost is necessary. Perhaps the de-dup
mechanism shouldn't incorporate comment-less posts as part of its data set.

------
kba
Med student rescues body part? More like German pilot.

~~~
kristianp
Or Med student who knows the right person.

~~~
sp332
This is what highly-connected networks of ridiculously rich and privileged
people are actually good for!

~~~
pacaro
True, although in the UK, there is no reason to believe that a med student is
"ridiculously rich and privileged".

------
adventureful
The stem cell century accelerates.

