The Daily Brief

This from BusinessWeek:

Cytori Therapeutics thinks your fat can save your life. The San Diego biotechnology company has come up with a method for isolating stem cells from a patient’s fat so they can be reinjected and grow into healthy tissue. Cytori’s groundbreaking Celution System, expected to begin clinical trials in humans next year, could be used to treat life-threatening ailments, such as ischemic heart disease, a restriction of blood flow to the heart.

[…]

Then there’s the vanity factor. “Everyone’s willing to give up a little fat these days,” says Cytori CEO Christopher Calhoun. And while the Food & Drug Administration currently doesn’t approve the use of stem cells extracted from fat, or adipose, tissue, these cells have been used abroad to repair bone injuries. What’s more, unlike many stem-cell companies, Cytori offers a relatively quick and straightforward procedure that can easily be explained to a patient.

Here’s how it works: After the fat is sucked out with a liposuction-like procedure, Cytori’s Celution device separates the stem cells from the bulk of the tissue. Within an hour of the removal, the patient receives an injection of his or her own concentrated stem cells.

PRIMING THE PUMP. This autumn, Cytori presented preclinical data demonstrating that after suffering heart attacks, pigs injected with their own adipose stem cells showed improvements over a control group. Calhoun says after a few weeks the treated pigs had more healthy cardiac muscle. “Whether it was newly created tissue or salvaged tissue we can’t say yet,” he says. “But the tissue was there.”

The study also found that the test groups’ hearts pumped blood more efficiently than those of the untreated animals. Because the procedure is quick, Calhoun argues that Celution is better equipped to treat the more dangerous acute cardiac episodes than other developing stem-cell treatments, which require the cells to be cultivated for days or weeks outside the body.

Still, the Celution device has a lot of clinical ground to cover. Even in a best-case scenario, it may be three to five years before the method wins FDA approval, Calhoun says. Generally speaking, that’s a little longer than it takes to win approval for a new medical device, but less than for a new drug.

[…]

FAT DEPOSITS. Cytori branched into new fields of medicine in 2002, acquiring StemSource, a company founded by UCLA professor Mark Hedrick, who discovered stem cells in fat tissue. Hedrick is now company president.

Despite the uncertainty of the approval process, outsiders see promise in Cytori. In November, it signed a joint venture agreement with Olympus (the camera maker also has medical-device businesses). Under the agreement, the companies are forming a joint venture that will manufacture future Celution products. Olympus also will take a stake in Cytori and has agreed to make an additional payment based on a predetermined milestone in the device’s development. Cytori plans to list on Nasdaq soon.

Should the Celution be approved, it might be a chance for Cytori to push a service no one ever expected to want: fat banking. Already on offer, it’s almost a novelty since there are no approved uses for the cells. Should Celution or adipose stem cells come into favor, that could change.

Younger fat, Calhoun says, has a higher concentration of stem cells and could be more effective than fat harvested later in life. Stored in a bank or in a body, these stem cells could introduce a new rationalization for rich holiday meals — particularly for the younger of the species. It’s not often that overindulgence could also turn out to be good for you.

Fascinating.

None other than Arthur C. Clarke himself chimes in on NASA’s further plans for space:

In 1969, the giant multistage rocket, discarded piecemeal after a single mission, was the only way of doing the job. That the job should be done was a political decision, made by a handful of men. (I have only recently learnt that Wernher von Braun used my The Exploration of Space (1952) to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon — like the South Pole — was reached half a century ahead of time.

If Nasa resumes lunar missions by 2018, that timing would be just about right: it will be only a year short of the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step”. But banking on solid rocket boosters to escape from Earth, as being planned, will not represent a big technological advance over the Apollo missions. Even if the spacecraft are reusable, it will still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch every kilogram into space. I think the rocket has as much future in space as dog sleds in serious Antarctic exploration. Of course, it is the only thing we have at the moment, so we must make the best use of it.

But I would urge Nasa to keep investing at least a small proportion of its substantial budget in supporting the research and development of alternatives to rockets. There is at least one idea that may ultimately make space transport cheap and affordable to ordinary people: the space elevator.

First conceived by a Russian engineer, Yuri Artsutanov, in 1960, it was reinvented by a group of American scientists a decade later. And it’s based on a simple — yet daring — concept.

Today’s communications satellites demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the Equator by matching its speed to the turning Earth, 22,300 miles (35,780 km) below. Now imagine a cable linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of launching payloads into orbit could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today’s costs.

I differ with the great author on two points: First, it was by no great vision or effort of von Braun or Korolev that we reached the Moon in 1969, rather than 2019, but the quest for military superiority. Not to deny their genius. But, had they never even existed, the achievement – or something of similar technological magnitude – would have occurred no more than a decade, rather than a half-century, later.

Second, orbit in the Clarke Belt is achieved because the centrifugal force of the orbiting satellite exactly matches the force imparted upon it by gravity. Propelling a payload up a tether attached to that satellite would upset that equilibrium. Further, their is the distributed mass of the tether itself to consider. It is therefore necessary that the satellite be in a far lower orbit, in order to maintain tension on the tether. Indeed, the path the transport vehicle takes to reach the satellite will not be a straight path, as is popularly envisioned, but a great parabolic arc.

Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: InstaPundit

Update: A bit red-faced after that sign-inversion. But those sort of things happen when you’re bouncing these things around in your head.

In any event, I never said the space elevator wouldn’t work, only that it wouldn’t be quite as currently envisioned. I still feel that the cable will arc into space, And it appears this effect has already been contemplated for the mass of the transport vehicle (“climber”, if you will), but not for the distributed mass of the cable itself.

Update: There is a spirited debate (of which I am pretty much on the defensive) on this subject, over at Transterrestrial Musings.

Today at Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds is skeptical about NASA’s plans to go to the Moon:

The problem is that this NASA approach looks like more of the same. Oh, it’s better than some earlier efforts: The program emphasizes astronauts learning to “live off the land” via lunar resources, an approach that seemed quite radical back when Bob Zubrin was first championing it. But the technology looks old — and not “proven reliable,” as Space Shuttle components have been less than ideal — and I don’t see any way this program will deliver what we need most: High flight rates and low costs.

I wonder, then, if the money wouldn’t be better spent on things that have a higher likelihood of delivering those, like space elevators. As I mentioned in an earlier column, space elevator technology promises drastically reduced costs to orbit (from which, as Robert Heinlein famously observed, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system in terms of energy) and it looks as if we could build a working space elevator — or several — within the $100 billion pricetag and over the same time frame.

I most hardily agree; our emphasis at this juncture should be on finding inexpensive and reliable ways to put people and materials into orbit. But I wouldn’t limit ourselves to space elevators. Other technologies, such as Fly Into Orbit and Rail Guns as 1st stage boosters are also quite promising. This sort of multi-pronged approach is best undertaken by the private sector.