Where angels fear to tread

People sometimes ask me if I've ever been to Israel - or to the Holy Land. And the answer is that I have, in 1966! That was before the Six Day War, when the political map so radically changed. As a family we did something which would be impossible nowadays, I suspect: drove overland across Europe, through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, in a black Ford Consul 375, spending a week in East Jerusalem (as it then was) before crossing through the Mandelbaum Gate into West Jerusalem (as it then was). The political arrangement seemed to be working quite peacefully, as far as I in my teenage  years could tell. However the uneasy equilibrium was destroyed when less than a year later Israel launched preemptive strikes against the perceived threat of hostile forces gathering on all its borders.

I'm not one for pontificating on the rights and wrongs of the present situation in the Middle East. I do suspect that meddling by external "powers" only exacerbates the mess. The British establishment has not learned the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, it seems, with its careless encouragement of the Syrian uprising over two years ago. I've just been listening to Katie Melua's thoughtful song:
"If a black man is racist, is it okay
if it's the white man's racism that made him that way,
'cause the bully's the victim, they say?
By some sense they're all the same,
'cause the line between wrong and right
is the width of a thread from a spider's web...". Apportioning blame is a mug's, or a thug's, game.

One thing I am certain of is that isolation and non-communication is not a productive policy. Which is why I am sorry that Stephen Hawking has decided not to attend a conference next month in Israel. At first it was announced "for health reasons"; then it was because of a boycott of Israel by British academics - New York Times report. It's sad, because dialogue is always more productive than silence. It's ironic, because the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem appears to be on the threshhold of a breakthrough in an ethical stem-cell treatment for ALS/MND (from which he and I suffer) and other neurodegenerative diseases, and I personally wouldn't want Israel to boycott me or fellow MND patients with the fruit of their research. A further irony is his nifty speech-generation device which is so well known as his "voice" has at its heart "a fiendishly clever silicon chip that was designed in . . . yes, Israel" (Rod Liddle, in The Sunday Times yesterday).

I much prefer the Jewish conductor, Daniel Barenboim's approach with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1999 with Palestinian American, Edward Said, which brings together musicians from all over the Middle East, including Israel and Iran. "The aim of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is to promote understanding between Israelis and Palestinians and pave the way for a peaceful and fair solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Barenboim himself has spoken of the ensemble as follows:
'The Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story. It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn't. It's not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well. The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project (for) the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it. I'm not trying to convert the Arab members of the Divan to the Israeli point of view, and [I'm] not trying to convince the Israelis to the Arab point of view. But I want to - and unfortunately I am alone in this now that Edward died a few years ago - ...create a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives.'" (Wikipedia) 

I was recently sent a link to this fascinating YouTube clip about Ulfat Khaider, an Arab-Israeli athlete. On Facebook, she's described as reaching high peaks "not only as a mountain climber, extreme sportswoman and volleyball player (she played for the Israeli national team), but as a remarkable woman striving for peace": YouTube Ulfat Khaider. This comment followed on Facebook: "Et on dit qu'il y a l'apartheid en Israel?! Pas seulement qu'il n'y a pas d'Apartheid, bien au contraire: dans quel pays arabe elle aurait pu devenir la champion qu'elle est? la femme libre et moderne qu'elle est? Bravo Ulfat et merci!" (And they say there's apartheid in Israel! Not only is there not apartheid - quite the contrary. In which Arab country could she have become the champion she is? The liberated modern woman that she is? Bravo and thanks!)

I try not to be naïve about the complexities of the Middle East and the Palestinian "question". Of course, I don't know the solution, but I would say, whether you're a scientist, musician or sportsman, that fighting ignorance is the better way than colluding with it. In Barenboim's words, "It is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it." 

"Untold possibilities"

Last time I wrote about Bram Harrison, the DJ with Locked-in Syndrome. A bit of the I article I omitted was this: "Harrison is cognitively sharp, funny and mischievous; a technology geek who holds faith in medical progress, stem cell advances in particular, to perhaps unlock him one day." 
Browsing the MND Association website this afternoon I came across this article: Association-funded stem cell research achieves milestone. I remember talking to Tom Isaacs, with Parkinson's, who walked 4500 miles round the British coast raising funds for research into that disease, about ten years ago. He had great faith that research would see a cure even within his lifetime. He founded The Cure Parkinson's Trust, whose watchword is "Hope". Neither he nor I could have foreseen the exponential acceleration of research into neurological conditions over that time. What particularly excites me about the research described below is that it doesn't use embryonic stem cells (i.e. obtained from fertility-treatment excess embryos) but induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) obtained from adult skin cells. For me it poses less of an ethical problem. Predictably this news didn't hit the national headlines, in contrast to embryonic stem cells - which seems to with strange regularity.


However, this is a really good news story for the reasons the article explains.

A cutting-edge stem cell research programme funded by the MND Association has produced a key development that could have a powerful impact on the search for treatments for MND.

The international research team, led by world-class scientists from the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London and Columbia University (New York), has for the first time used stem cells derived from adult skin to generate living human motor neurones that display key characteristics of MND.

These diseased neurones offer huge potential. As a uniquely realistic laboratory model of the disease they could allow for rapid screening of thousands of drugs, as well as furthering understanding of underlying disease mechanisms.

What did the researchers do?

Researchers started with skin cells donated by a 56 year old man with the rare, inherited form of MND caused by mistakes in the TDP-43 gene. Although abnormalities in this gene are uncommon, the protein produced by the TDP-43 gene has been implicated as a pivotal player in the majority of cases of MND.

Scientists used a special cocktail of chemicals to ‘reprogramme’ the donated skin cells, turning them first into stem cells similar to those derived from embryos and then into motor neurones.

Compared to motor neurones generated from the skin cells of healthy individuals, the neurones with the abnormal TDP-43 demonstrated decreased survival and increased vulnerability to damage.

The TDP-43 protein also displayed a greater tendency towards clumping together, or aggregating. This is a recognised hallmark of diseased neurones in MND and for the first time provides scientists with the opportunity to see the direct effect of abnormal TDP-43 on living human cells.

“Untold possibilities”

The team’s results, published as a ‘free to access’ article in the journal PNAS, provide proof of principle that skin cells can be successfully turned into diseased motor neurones.

At the same time they represent significant progress towards the key aim of this groundbreaking £800,000 programme: to develop and characterise a robust human cell model of MND that can be made available to scientists across the world.

Dr Brian Dickie, director of research development at the MND Association, said: “This advance is a significant milestone on the road to developing a laboratory model of MND that faithfully reflects the cellular events happening in the patient. It is also a testament to the importance of international collaboration, with eminent scientists from leading institutions around the world focused on the common goal of understanding and, ultimately, defeating this devastating disease”.

Prof Siddharthan Chandran of the University of Edinburgh, who is leading the programme, said: “Using patient stem cells to model MND in a dish offers untold possibilities for how we study the cause of this terrible disease as well as accelerating drug discovery by providing a cost effective way to test many thousands of potential treatments.”

How much better is it to cherish hope than to abandon it. Wasn't it Dante's Hell that had the sign over it, "Abandon Hope, all ye who enter here"? Well, here's a reason for hope, maybe not for my generation, or just maybe so....

Research good news

I was interested to come across an article about research into the "direct conversion" of skin cells into nerve cells without the use of stem cells. The problem with the embryonic stem-cell route is the risk of the cells developing tumours. "In mid-August, the journal Nature published three separate papers describing methods for direct conversion of normal skin cells into nerve cells.... (In Sweden) Research leader Dr. Malin Parmar said he was surprised at how receptive the fibroblasts were to new instructions:

'We didn’t really believe this would work, to begin with it was mostly just an interesting experiment to try. However, we soon saw that the cells were surprisingly receptive to instructions.'

The Swedish team noted that using the direct conversion technique to bypass stem cells avoided the ethical problems inherent with embryonic stem cells, as well as the tendency of embryonic stem cells to form tumors. The paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." (from Life News)

The point of producing nerve cells is to help in researching diseases such as Parkinsons, Alzheimers, MS and MND, to see the causes and development of the diseases, which is turn leads to therapies. In my view not using embryonic stem-cells (i.e. derived from embryos with the potential for life) is entirely preferable. I don't want my cure to be at the expense of another's life.