I am the author of a science fiction novel entitled “The Bureau of Resurrection”. You can check it out by going to createspace.com/3330562 (see links in the right margin) or by going to Amazon.com and searching the title where you can use the search inside this book feature to read excerpts.

This story is a fanciful look at how biotechnology could lead to strange bargains between government, religion and science. But the ethical dilemmas in this book are not faunciful. They are very real.

In the future, people are re-born every so often, by the use of stem cells, to keep them physically young. The problem is that their minds age. The main character is employed to rejuvenate their minds. But bad things happen when he electronically subtracts their sins. This evil finds a home. However, our hero gets help from a woman who looks like Snow White, an unstable genius, and a man who can’t decide if he is Ensign Sulu, or a clock.

Stem cells are in the news almost constantly. You could think of them as the biological equivalent of the Swiss Army knife. Except, in this case, there are about 200 different tools (types of cells) built in. But you can only pull out one blade or tool at a time. And once you have, you can’t use any other tool. (Stem cells can give rise to cells with specific functions but those cells cannot usually go back to being stem cells.) Stem cells can also give rise to more stem cells so that they persist for a long time. (Try doing that with a Swiss Army knife!)

There are embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. In mice or man (or any other mammal) embryonic stem cells are obtained from the center of a blastocyst. The name blastocyst sounds like something painful to me. But it is the name for an embryo 5 days after a sperm has fertilized an egg when it is still smaller than a period. Among the adult stem cells that are known, there are hematopoietic stem cells (that give rise to your blood cells), ones for generating brain cells, the outer layer of the skin, the lining of your digestive tract etc.

What makes embryonic stem cells special compared to adult stem cells is that they have the full 200 tools but adult stem cells do not. And scientists have mastered the art of getting the embryonic stem cells to grow very well in culture.

I’m proud to say that immunology led the way in the field of stem cells. Hematopoietic or blood stem cells were discovered way back when Immuoman was just an immunokid (the 1950s). Since then thousands of patients with cancer and other diseases of the blood have been saved by bone marrow and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. In contrast, embryonic stem cells were not discovered until the 1980s in mice and in humans in 1998.

Recently, scientists at UCLA were able to take a mouse fibroblast (a cell that provides structure to tissues such as the underlying layer of the skin), and put genetic material into them that released the expression of genes for all the functions of other cells (unlocked the other tools in the knife). In essence, what they have done is to take a “run of the mill” adult cell (not even a stem cell of any kind) and turn it into an embryonic stem cell. If this can be repeated with human cells, the whole debate about using embryonic stem cells for research and medicine will become obsolete.

For now, however, the moral and ethical dilemmas related to the use of embryonic stem cells rage on. The core theological question is: When does a human being become a human being? If the blastocyst is already human, then we tread a slippery slope by exploiting these tissues. If a person does not become a person until later in development, then the answer is very different. The potential to save thousands, perhaps millions of lives also weighs in the balance. This is why the debate over embryonic stem cells is probably the single most complex bioethical issue facing the world today.

In the not too distant future, stem cells could allow medicine to do for patients with illnesses such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, strokes, burns, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and trauma what bone marrow transplantation has already done for thousands of patients with blood disorders. These cells could also be used for basic medical research and drug testing. And they could be used to engineer whole tissues and organs for the replacement of diseased or worn out parts. The potential impact of stem cells is staggering and we may not even yet have a full vision of what they could do for the human race. It’s like the old adage: “It is possible to count the seeds in an apple, but how many apples are in a seed?” So we might ask today: How many human lives are in one small cell? The answer is huge.

I highly recommend the following free booklets on the web: http://dels.nas.edu/bls/stemcells/booklet.shtml http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/

In 1918, a postman went off to deliver mail to Brevig Mission, a small, remote Native Alaskan village, in spite of the fact that he was not feeling well. A week later, 85% of the people in the village, including those in the prime of their life, had died, having been suffocated by their own blood. In this same year and the year that followed, 25 to 50 million people died of influenza (flu) worldwide. The cause of this pandemic was a strain of the avian influenza virus, better known as bird flu. Does the recent increase in the number of cases of bird flu among domestic birds in Southeast Asia signify the possible return of such a devastating scourge?

The causes of viral influenza (flu) among humans are the Type A, Type B and Type C influenza viruses. Type B and C influenza viruses do not infect animals, only humans. Type A influenza viruses include those that infect humans, birds, pigs and horses.. Bird flu viruses are closely related to Type A human flu viruses and it is believed that at least parts of these viruses originated from bird flu viruses.

Viruses are made of DNA or RNA that is encapsulated in a protein shell or capsid. Sub-types of Type A influenza viruses are named for two of the proteins found on the outside of this outer shell that differ in sequence from strain to strain. These are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase and are abbreviated H and N. For example, the bird flu virus that caused the 1918-19 pandemic is now classified as Avian H1N1. The bird flu strains showing up in recent years are H5N1 and H5N2. While the most common human flu sub-types this year are H3N2 and H1N1 (but not the same as the H1N1 bird flu virus that caused the 1918-19 pandemic!). These strains come and go for two reasons: 1. Influenza viruses are genetically unstable and therefore mutate and recombine over time. and 2. New viral strains are selected by the presence of a susceptible population as human (and bird) populations become immune to past strains,.

Will the current bird flu viruses turn on humans the way the H1N1 bird flu virus did in 1918? No one knows the answer because no one knows how this happened in 1918. In an effort to better understand the 1918 bird flu virus, scientists have constructed a flu virus containing the H and N genes of this original 1918 pandemic bird flu virus using genetic material from one of the victims of Brevig Mission, Alaska, which had been preserved by the cold climate. Infection studies in mice have not deciphered why this bird flu virus turned on humans but have reinforced what we already knew - that this was one really nasty virus. One of the major differences between the human bird flu cases of 1918-19 and those of individuals infected by human strains is that the 1918-19 pandemic primarily killed adults in the 25 - 34 year old range (compared to today’s human viruses strains that result in greater fatality rates among the very young and the very old).

So far the numbers of humans infected during recent outbreaks of flu among domestic birds have been relatively small. This is because another difference between current bird flu viruses as compared to human viruses is that they do not transmit well to humans. And even when they do, they do not seem to be capable of spreading from person to person they way that human viruses do. If they ever gain this capability, we could be in deep trouble. However, there are weapons available in 2005 that were not present in 1918 for treating the flu. There are currently four FDA approved medications that block the multiplication of influenza viruses that would likely be effective against bird flu viral strains. The bad news is that there is no current vaccine with which to vaccinate humans against bird flu. This would likely have to be developed after the pandemic is already in progress (because the developers would have to know which strain to use to produce the vaccine). This could take a few months (unlike that movie with Dustin Hoffman where they are able to stop an epidemic overnight – that only happens in Hollywood).

What is the bottom line? Get vaccinated against the current strains of human flu. This vaccine is available in either inactivated or attenuated live forms. If you are younger than 5 years of age or older than 49 years of age or your immune system is comprimised, you have to stick (no pun intended) with the more commonly used inactivated one that you get by needle. Both the inactivated and attenuated vaccines are designed to induce immunity against human Type A H3N2 and H1N1 and the currently prevalent Type B human virus. As far as bird flu goes, all we can do now is watch the news, support public health efforts to prepare for a possible pandemic, and pray that none of the current bird flu viral strains figure out how to spread from human to human.

If you want to know more about influenza, I recommend the US Centers for Disease Control web site: http://www.cdc.gov/flu.