Question: Is schizophrenia a disease that could be cured by embryonic stem cell treatment in the future? And what is your opinion on emrbyonic stem cell research?

Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:

Personally I doubt that embryonic stem cell treatment will ever be used for schizophrenia. It is better suited for tackling diseases in which whole groups of cells stop working all together (such as Parkinson’s). Schizophrenia seems to occur when much more subtle things go wrong, so rather than adding new cells we need to fix the ones that are normally there. In the short term this will probably be through the use of new improved drugs, although it is possible that gene therapy may be of use in the long term.

As for stem cells generally, that is a complex area. Speaking scientifically the embryos used to generate them are two early to have the ability to “think” or be a person, and most of them are unused IVF embryos that were to be destroyed anyway. However it is still for me a grey area. There are a lot of people working on ways of generating more “ethical” stem cells, but whether these will ever be as useful as embryonic ones remains to be seen.