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Australian Research Team Finds Stem Cell Gold in the Nose

BRISBANE, March 22, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dr. Alan Mackay-Sim and his small team of researchers at Griffith University have just published the results of a four-year study of stem cells obtained from the inside of the nose. Their work shows once again that adult stem cells can be made to change into any cells in the body without the medical or ethical problems of embryo cells. Mackay-Sim said almost any kind of tissue in the body could be obtained from olfactory stem cells including heart cells, brain cells and nerve cells, without immune system rejection or formation of tumors.

The cells are being hailed not only for their flexibility but for the ease with which they can be harvested - a ten-minute procedure that is not dangerous and only mildly uncomfortable. They also seem to have the advantage, unlike bone marrow stem cells, of very readily reproducing in the lab. The team was able to culture millions of them and grow a wide variety of tissue samples very easily.

While the big Australian universities such as Monash are well-funded in their destructive embryo research, Mackay-Sim's team made this progress on a few hundred-thousand a year. In fact, one member of his team found himself so strapped that he had to leave the work to manage a grocery store for a time.

"It has been a disregarded area of research generally," Mackay-Sim said. "Whenever I presented a paper, the feedback I would get was that our work was 'interesting but weird'."

The findings have so excited the Australian scientific community that Tony Abbott, the federal Health Minister, indicated it may influence the vote when legislation allowing research on in vitro embryos comes up for review.

Abbot said, "If adult stem cell research is as prospective as this particular project seems to suggest, well, then all those moral dilemmas we were wrestling with a few years ago and will have to wrestle with again when the legislation [permitting the use for research of excess embryos created through IVF before April 2002] comes up for review, we may be delivered from."

George Cardinal Pell, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney said, "I hope it will [lead to that]. I think it deserves to be evaluated with the full rigour and I hope that after that rigorous assessment we'll see just how significant this is. I think there is a real possibility that [the Griffith University scientists] have made an enormous contribution."

The research was partly funded by a $50,000 grant from the Catholic Church of Australia.

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