for those in countries who won’t need their insurance company’s approval to pay for a liver transplant operation:
US scientists have created working liver grafts in the lab, and say the research could one day allow the growth of livers for transplant. […]
The technique … is the same as that used when a windpipe made with the patient’s own stem cells was successfully implanted in Spain in late 2008 in the world’s first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant.
Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that wealthy people in America will benefit from these medical advances sooner and at a greater rate than anyone else?
Tis good news and a hint of what we may have seen if Bush hadn’t knocked so much research, not just on stem cells, to its knees.
Seriously? Try seeing this through a broader lens than your political cynicsm.
The ability to grow host organs from stem cells will be a huge feat and a major step forward. It won’t benefit anyone until it happens, and it won’t get cheaper until it’s used.
Furthermore, low-income organ recipients today sometimes can’t afford their immunosuppressive therapy. In the worst case, their bodies reject the transplants. Having a transplanted organ that the immune system won’t reject will be a huge help in avoiding expensive long-term therapy; you could argue that in time it will help low-income recipients more than the rich.
A major concern of medical ethics used to be (and still is, with paid trials) that the poor and vulnerable were used as experimental subjects and training tools. That’s been addressed to large degree. But to complain about the rich using themselves as experimental subjects is a little much given the whole context here, and the fact that this has the potential to drastically improve the lives of all people who need transplants.
Kudos to the researchers who might make this dream a reality.