“This is a roaring success,” said ophthalmologist Dr. Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis, who had no role in the study — the longest and largest of its kind.

Stem cell transplants offer hope to the thousands of people worldwide every year who suffer chemical burns on their corneas from heavy-duty cleansers or other substances at work or at home.

The approach would not help people with damage to the optic nerve or macular degeneration, which involves the retina. Nor would it work in people who are completely blind in both eyes, because doctors need at least some healthy tissue that they can transplant.

In the study, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers took a small number of stem cells from a patient’s healthy eye, multiplied them in the lab and placed them into the burned eye, where they were able to grow new corneal tissue to replace what had been damaged. Since the stem cells are from their own bodies, the patients do not need to take anti-rejection drugs.

Adult stem cells have been used for decades to cure blood cancers such as leukemia and diseases like sickle cell anemia. But fixing a problem like damaged eyes is a relatively new use. Researchers have been studying cell therapy for a host of other diseases, including diabetes and heart failure, with limited success.

Adult stem cells, which are found around the body, are different from embryonic stem cells, which come from human embryos and have stirred ethical concerns because removing the cells requires destroying the embryos.

Currently, people with eye burns can get an artificial cornea, a procedure that carries such complications as infection and glaucoma, or they can receive a transplant using stem cells from a cadaver, but that requires taking drugs to prevent rejection.

The Italian study involved 106 patients treated between 1998 and 2007. Most had extensive damage in one eye, and some had such limited vision that they could only sense light, count fingers or perceive hand motions. Many had been blind for years and had had unsuccessful operations to restore their vision.

The cells were taken from the limbus, the rim around the cornea, the clear window that covers the colored part of the eye. In a normal eye, stem cells in the limbus are like factories, churning out new cells to replace dead corneal cells. When an injury kills off the stem cells, scar tissue forms over the cornea, clouding vision and causing blindness.

In the Italian study, the doctors removed scar tissue over the cornea and glued the laboratory-grown stem cells over the injured eye. In cases where both eyes were damaged by burns, cells were taken from an unaffected part of the limbus.

Researchers followed the patients for an average of three years and some as long as a decade. More than three-quarters regained sight after the transplant. An additional 13 percent were considered a partial success. Though their vision improved, they still had some cloudiness in the cornea.

Patients with superficial damage were able to see within one to two months. Those with more extensive injuries took several months longer.

“They were incredibly happy. Some said it was a miracle,” said one of the study leaders, Graziella Pellegrini of the University of Modena’s Center for Regenerative Medicine in Italy. “It was not a miracle. It was simply a technique.”

The study was partly funded by the Italian government.

Researchers in the United States have been testing a different way to use self-supplied stem cells, but that work is preliminary.

One of the successful transplants in the Italian study involved a man who had severe damage in both eyes as a result of a chemical burn in 1948. Doctors grafted stem cells from a small section of his left eye to both eyes. His vision is now close to normal.

In 2008, there were 2,850 work-related chemical burns to the eyes in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Schwab of UC Davis said stem cell transplants would not help those blinded by burns in both eyes because doctors need stem cells to do the procedure.

“I don’t want to give the false hope that this will answer their prayers,” he said.

Dr. Sophie Deng, a cornea expert at the UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, said the biggest advantage was that the Italian doctors were able to expand the number of stem cells in the lab. This technique is less invasive than taking a large tissue sample from the eye and lowers the chance of an eye injury.

“The key is whether you can find a good stem cell population and expand it,” she said.

——

Online:

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

I later became friendly with one of the players on the field that day, Jets cornerback Steve Tannen. We sat in my step-brother’s living room watching another Super Bowl, and he explained what was going on. I still didn’t get it. My smug superior pose was like a suit of armor. I clanked when I walked. An actual NFL player was sitting on a couch with me, explaining the intricacies of the game, and all I could think was, “This is way too complicated for such a dumb sport.”

I might never have discovered the game at all, but around 10 years ago, something completely unexpected happened. I fell in love with a fan.

Annie and I worked together in my contracting business and we were painting a kitchen one Sunday afternoon, when she put on the radio. Not NPR as usual, but an AM station out of New York City, WFAN. The Giants were playing, and she didn’t want to miss the game. She liked listening almost as much as watching, which was convenient since the hated Patriots had knocked the Giants off the Boston television stations most Sundays.

Bob Papa and Dick Lynch called the games better than the boneheads on Fox and ABC, and she liked constructing the plays in her mind from their rapid-fire descriptions: “It’s third and 18, Collins in the shotgun. Amani Toomer split wide left, Cross to the right, Tiki Barber in the slot. Long snap from center. Collins back to pass. He has Amani Toomer up the left side line, he’s all alone … the pass is short, he comes back for the ball, makes the catch, in typical Toomer fashion, dragging both toes in-bounds. That’s a miraculous catch at the 12 yard line and — no, there’s a flag on the play. It’s coming back, folks.”

I didn’t understand most of this. It was like listening to cricket or curling. But Annie sure did. I’ll never forget her howl and rage and frustration at that moment, when it turned out that Roman Oben had forced the holding call.

“What the hell are you doing?!” she shouted at the radio. “They’re killing us with these penalties! You don’t hold there! Not there! Not now! We’re giving them the game! Why can’t they just let them play? Now watch! It’s fourth and inches and Fassel’s going for the field goal! Just give Tiki the ball! Let him run it!” But he didn’t, and the kick went wide. Another dismal day for the Giants.

But the fans were used to days like that, in the lean years before the great squad of the mid-’80s and the tough years since. And at the end of all those seasons, they’d just sigh and say, “Maybe next year…” There was always plenty of time to lick your wounds and prepare for the next season: It was a long way to September.

Eventually I learned the terminology, and more and more every Sunday I got drawn into the games. It had happened the same way for Annie, as a little girl, sitting with her dad, watching the games on television — or traveling to Yankee Stadium, and even the Yale Bowl, during those seasons when the Giants didn’t have a venue of their own. Football turned into the best way to spend time with him: It gave them an endlessly fascinating topic in common, and a perfect strategy for getting to know her otherwise difficult and remote father. A few years later I saw “Remember the Titans,” and thought I glimpsed a little of Annie in the white coach’s 10-year-old daughter, screaming at the TV. Not that much has changed. She still paces and chides and screams, “GO DEFENSE,” on those crucial goal-line stands. I don’t think Annie sat down once through the whole of Super Bowl 44, when the Giants triumphed in their rematch with the hated Patriots.

She’s had her glory moments as a fan. She submitted a song about the team — lyrics to the tune of Ora Lee — in a FAN contest, and won it. She wound up singing on the radio with Offensive Tackle Karl Nelson. Bob Papa had written “Good” on the sheet she submitted — as terse and emphatic as the call on an extra point. Some sample lyrics:

Twelve and Four

Twelve and Four

We are playoff bound

With Stephen Baker in the air

And Otis on the ground

A friend of Annie’s worked for the New Yorker, and the big day got written up as a Talk of the Town piece.

Cool.

The more I watched, the more I fell in love with the game. I gloried in the spectacular pounding the Giants gave the Vikings on the way to that other Super Bowl, in 2000 — and suffered through their humiliating loss to the Ravens, a few weeks later. We drove all the way down to Connecticut for that calamity. Annie’s whole family was morbidly in tune with the team, reading the mood on the field even before the kickoff. “They look flat,” her dad announced as the Giants ran out onto the field. It seemed nuts to me, but they were right. “It’s all about emotion,” Annie told me, and I began to sense that myself, feeling the shifts in psychic energy on the field with that crucial touchdown before the halftime, or the break in concentration when the other team called a disruptive timeout.

With the increasing popularity of so-called reality TV and the cultural ascendance of unscripted drama — from “The Amazing Race” to “American Idol,” from “Survivor” to “The Biggest Loser” — I started to realize a curious small truth: Football is our true reality TV, and our most fascinating unscripted drama. I had seen football movies like “Varsity Blues,” where the final victory was a foregone conclusion. In the actual game, anything can happen. An interception or a turnover, a miscalculated on-side kick, can turn a game upside down.

I realized that football defines itself through series of paradoxes. It represents a kind of utopian view of America, where people work together toward a common goal, a world without rancor or racism, a peaceable kingdom … where men are broken and battered in ferocious combat every week. It’s a brutal sport that rewards elegance and grace, that elevates men to unparalleled stardom through intricate self-effacing military teamwork; a bruising physical competition that relies on levels of knowledge and intuition and cerebral analysis that would give an MIT statistics professor pause. It takes place on a hundred-yard playing field, and yet any individual game can be decided by a matter of inches; it plays itself out over almost four hours but so often resolves itself in the last few seconds — that overtime field goal in the air as the clock runs down.

It draws families together, like Annie’s; and friends, like Stephen and me (we commiserate now, about the Raiders and the Giants); and cities, like New Orleans and Indianapolis, whose teams will be duking it out this Sunday in Miami. And it gives us an extraordinarily diverse cast of characters to enjoy: the old legends thinking about retirement, the kids scoring their first NFL touchdowns ever, in the autumn sunlight; the younger brother struggling in his brother’s shadow and the older brother moving closer to the title of greatest quarterback of all time, and closing in on it this weekend, beyond the glory of another ring. And the other players who’ll never get the ring — Tiki Barber, who retired too soon; or Barry Sanders, quitting because he was contractually bound to play out his career with a losing team. All the great careers ruined by traffic accidents and drug scandals, or by carrying a loaded gun in the waistband of your sweat pants and accidentally shooting yourself in the leg.

It’s a complex, fascinating world and I know I’m a part of it at last as I wait for Peyton to throw that first pass on Sunday, and wonder what happened to his little brother’s team, lying down to be trampled by the Vikings in a humiliating final game, and blow out a long breath and say, “Oh well. Maybe next year.”

I’ll be watching the Combine and the draft on the NFL channel, discussing the prospects with my family. (The Giants need help on their offensive line.) It’s not much, but I’ll take what I can get.

It’s a long way to September. 

Technically, that’s not true — 11 paragraphs into the article, the religions of the couple in question, Adrianna and Robert Potter, are mentioned (she’s a lapsed Catholic, he’s a Methodist). And after 10 paragraphs, the author, Manya A. Brachear, notes, “Such decisions, doctors say, are often informed and framed by faith” — which is enough to justify focusing on that angle for one article. But it would be nice if said article either led with a clear indication that it was doing just that, or else acknowledged that “What would Jesus do?” is not the central question facing every couple with embryos in storage. Laura continues, “There is no one saying, ‘Hey, guess what, embryos aren’t people’ — whether that comes from a scientist, an atheist, or simply a different set of Christians. There’s also no ‘here are some of the things that stem cell research is used for’ info. It’s all, ‘Your dead babies will go to Science, whatever that is.’”

That’s an exaggeration, but not by all that much. Writes Brachear, “At this time last year, doctors say, the absence of government funds combined with the economic downturn stalled most meaningful embryonic science, making donations to research a riskier and more radical option. Some laboratories stopped accepting donations, forcing some fertility centers to hold on to embryos despite parents’ preference to devote them to research.” So, wait, deciding that you’d like your embryos to go to science somehow becomes “risky” and “radical” if there’s a chance they might not be used for research? I guess that makes sense if, like Adrianna Potter, you only favor donating embryos to science to promote “the creation of new life” — she notes that research led to their ability to conceive via IVF, and would like to help other couples. Her husband, Robert, either wants to keep them “to fulfill God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply” or donate them to another infertile couple. So for them, donating embryos to science with no guarantee that they’ll be used might indeed seem risky and/or radical. But what about couples who make that choice simply because they’d rather see the embryos go to good use than discard them? Because they believe in the promise of stem cell research — and at this time last year, were probably hoping that Obama would revoke the ban on federal funding for it, which he did? At this point in the article, there’s still been no clear acknowledgment that this particular debate has a faith-specific context — but any other context is completely ignored.

And that’s the subtle part. Later, Brachear writes, “Robert doesn’t trust that every embryo [donated to science] fulfills a greater purpose. He can’t imagine sentencing two potential children to short lives that would end in a laboratory.” I’m sorry, I can get on board with “potential children,” emphasis on potential, but short lives? No. The idea that an embryo has a “life” that can be ended, even when it’s never seen the inside of a woman’s uterus, is a purely religious one; Robert seems to hold that belief as part of his faith, which is fine, but could we please get some quotation marks, or even a non-specific “he said” on that? Because otherwise, you’re asking the reader to accept the concept of embryonic personhood as a given. And boy, this reader doesn’t.

As Laura said, an article about Christians struggling with a decision that raises serious questions about their own faith versus science is a very interesting idea — and if the headline or subhead or first nine and a half paragraphs indicated that that is, in fact, the subject here, I would have an entirely different take on the execution. Instead, a peculiarly religious dilemma is universalized — “Families struggle with science, faith,” reads the subhead — and people who have no faith-based qualms about donating embryos to science (including many religious people, as well as those who don’t have faith-basied qualms, period) are simply not acknowledged. Not to mention, “struggling with science” is presented as wondering whether your embryos’ “lives” will have meaning in a lab — which, call me crazy, still sounds more like struggling with faith. At a time when anti-choice groups are sincerely attempting to redefine personhood as “the beginning of biological development” — raising the possibility of everything from miscarriages being investigated as potential homicides to pregnant women qualifying for the carpool lane — blurring the line between religious beliefs and observable facts is what I would call “risky” and “radical.” 

But one piece of biographical information about Elizabeth Blackburn was left out — her brave role in exposing the charade of George W. Bush’s “President’s Council on Bioethics.”

Let’s outsource the story to Nick Anthis, at the Scientific Activist.

From 2001 to 2004 [Blackburn] served as one of only three full-time biomedical researchers on the 17-to-18-member council. In 2004, she was fired from the council, along with another member who disagreed with the administration’s position on some of the relevant issues.

Blackburn spoke out about the Council of Bioethics, demonstrating that despite its written mission to be a body that monitors research developments and recommends appropriate guidelines, it was really just a tool for parroting the Bush Administration’s positions on certain hot-button issues — particularly embryonic stem cell research. Thus, Blackburn played a central and important role in revealing the extent of the political interference in science that pervaded the Bush Administration.

After her firing, Blackburn published a strongly worded account of her experiences in the New England Journal of Medicine. Her closing paragraph definitely deserves a prize:

When prominent scientists must fear that descriptions of their research will be misrepresented and misused by their government to advance political ends, something is deeply wrong. Leading scientists are routinely called on to volunteer their expertise to the government, through study sections of the National Institutes of Health and advisory panels of the National Academy of Sciences and as advisers to departments ranging from health and human services to defense. It has been the unspoken attitude of the scientific community that it is our duty to serve our government in this manner, independent of our personal political affiliations and those of the administration in effect at the time. But something has changed. The healthy skepticism of scientists has turned to cynicism. There is a growing sense that scientific research — which, after all, is defined by the quest for truth — is being manipulated for political ends. There is evidence that such manipulation is being achieved through the stacking of the membership of advisory bodies and through the delay and misrepresentation of their reports. As a naturalized citizen of the United States, I have an immigrant’s love for my country. But our country must not fail us. Scientific advice should and must be protected from the influence of politics. Will the President’s Council on Bioethics be up to that challenge?