The danger of  commercial support for human life science research

Stem cells for the consumer

Now that the technology and scientific knowledge, of artificial synthesis of proteins, is developing with high speed we have to realize what’s going on. What are we doing?

Today and for the next future this will be a quite important issue. Stem cell therapy is one of the options for two groups of interest. Of course the clinical research is very promising. Pharmaceutical industries are rapidly investing in developing proteins for stem cell therapy. Billions of dollars $$$.  

But realize that our body is an excellent sophisticated protein factory to create all stem cells we need. No  laboratory will equal our built-in protein machine.

We may suffer from degeneration and a lot of nasty disorders, when our protein system degenerates or fails, like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer etc.,etc.. These could each probably treated with stem cell therapy in the future.

But from this view, do we have to invest in research to restore our own built-in protein machine or ignore it and look for artificial synthesis technologies to promote commercial products. An amazing great profit seeking stream will menace and manipulate the objective scientific research. As a matter of fact, restoring technologies for our protein household will hardly result in a mega production of commercial products.

I’m afraid that research support is going again to be a subject of the pharmaceutical industry. Who is the target group? Share holders or patients? What about fundamental science? What’s a scientist? A product engineer? Just a matter of concern!

But who is paying, or should have, all that research? Commerce? Then they will expect a commercial product with the highest profit!

Maybe I choose always the wrong side. A tough life but quite interesting and adventurous and first of all mortal in our kind of consumer system. But consider that what I discovered should never be discovered with the aim of industry.



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Tom Mostert
Synapius Scientiarum Medicæ