Don Ho up and alert after heart treatment

Dec. 8, 2005 (UPI delivered by Newstex) -- Hawaiian singer Don Ho was out of intensive care at a Bangkok hospital Thursday after undergoing an experimental heart procedure. His publicist said the 75-year-old entertainer was "up and alert" the Honolulu Advertiser reported. Ho had his own stem cells injected into his heart Monday night, which is expected to improve the muscle's pumping ability by as much as 70 percent. Ho suffers from cardiomyopathy and his doctor said conventional surgery could do nothing to ease the inflammation. The procedure, which is not available in the United States, was performed by former University of Michigan cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Kit Arom and overseen by Dr. Amit Patel of Pittsburgh. Arom left U of M a few years back to care for the king of Thailand. Ho is expected to return to Hawaii within the next two weeks.

Here's an interesting comment by Ray Kurzweil on the increasing speed of advances in biotech and what it means to all of us.

"The next big revolution that's going to affect us right away is biological technology, because we've merged biological knowledge with information processing. We are in the early stages of understanding life processes and disease processes by understanding the genome and how the genome expresses itself in protein. And we're going to find - and this has been apparent all along - that there's a slippery slope and no clear definition of where life begins. Both sides of the abortion debate have been afraid to get off the edges of that debate: that life starts at conception on the one hand or it starts literally at birth on the other. They don't want to get off those edges, because they realize it's just a completely slippery slope from one end to the other.

But we're going to make it even more slippery. We'll be able to create stem cells without ever actually going through the fertilized egg. What's the difference between a skin cell, which has all the genes, and a fertilized egg? The only differences are some proteins in the eggs and some signaling factors that we don't fully understand, yet that are basically proteins. We will get to the point where we'll be able to take some protein mix, which is just a bunch of chemicals and clearly not a human being, and add it to a skin cell to create a fertilized egg that we can then immediately differentiate into any cell of the body. When I go like this and brush off thousands of skin cells, I will be destroying thousands of potential people. There's not going to be any clear boundary.

This is another way of saying also that science and technology are going to find a way around the controversy. In the future, we'll be able to do therapeutic cloning, which is a very important technology that completely avoids the concept of the fetus. We'll be able to take skin cells and create, pretty directly without ever going through a fetus, all the cells we need.

We're not that far away from being able to create new cells. For example, I'm 53 but with my DNA, I'll be able to create the heart cells of a 25-year-old man, and I can replace my heart with those cells without surgery just by sending them through my blood stream. They'll take up residence in the heart, so at first I'll have a heart that's one percent young cells and 99 percent older ones. But if I keep doing this every day, a year later, my heart is 99 percent young cells. With that kind of therapy we can ultimately replenish all the cell tissues and the organs in the body. This is not something that will happen tomorrow, but these are the kinds of revolutionary processes we're on the verge of.

If you look at human longevity - which is another one of these exponential trends - you'll notice that we added a few days every year to the human life expectancy in the 18th century. In the 19th century we added a few weeks every year, and now we're now adding over a hundred days a year, through all of these developments, which are going to continue to accelerate. Many knowledgeable observers, including myself, feel that within ten years we'll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy.

As we get older, human life expectancy will actually move out at a faster rate than we're actually progressing in age, so if we can hang in there, our generation is right on the edge. We have to watch our health the old-fashioned way for a while longer so we're not the last generation to die prematurely. But if you look at our kids, by the time they're 20, 30, 40 years old, these technologies will be so advanced that human life expectancy will be pushed way out.

There is also the more fundamental issue of whether or not ethical debates are going to stop the developments that I'm talking about. It's all very good to have these mathematical models and these trends, but the question is if they going to hit a wall because people, for one reason or another - through war or ethical debates such as the stem cell issue controversy - thwart this ongoing exponential development.

I strongly believe that's not the case. These ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any of these biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates. To some extent, they may have to find some other ways around some of the limitations, but there are so many developments going on. There are dozens of very exciting ideas about how to use genomic information and proteomic information. Although the controversies may attach themselves to one idea here or there, there's such a river of advances. The concept of technological advance is so deeply ingrained in our society that it's an enormous imperative. Bill Joy has gotten around - correctly - talking about the dangers, and I agree that the dangers are there, but you can't stop ongoing development."

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