Dr. Robert Ersek, a 66-year-old plastic surgeon, invited reporters to his Texas operating room recently and, in front of their cameras, proceeded to liposuction himself.
After numbing the skin near his navel, he slipped in a hollow tube about a quarter of an inch wide and moved it back and forth until it had sucked out about half a pound of fat.
His office throws away tons of liposuctioned fat each year. But he shipped his to a California company for processing and storage of some of the cells.
Why did he do that? It turns out the type of cell being stored for Ersek is medically promising.
Medical value? In fat? The waist product most people want to get rid of?
It's true. Fat is a little-discussed source of stem cells, versatile biological building blocks that can morph into a variety of tissues. Fat-derived stem cells, researchers say, might someday provide replacement tissue for treating such conditions as Parkinson's disease, heart attacks, heart failure and bone defects.
"We're trying to make fat do good," said Dr. J. Peter Rubin, assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He's also president of the fledgling International Fat Applied Technology Society.
The fat-derived cells, being studied by relatively few labs, aren't the ones that store fat. Instead, they're found in between fat-storing cells. They're an example of so-called "adult" stem cells, different from the controversial embryonic stem cells.
When stem cells are taken from an embryo, the embryo is destroyed. That's abhorrent to people who consider an embryo to be developing human life. President Bush has restricted federal money for research into embryonic stem cells, a step that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry has said he will reverse if elected.
Some who oppose research into embryonic stem cells champion the cause of adult stem cells, found in bone marrow and elsewhere, and theoretically could be taken from the very people who will be treated with them. Scientists have found evidence that adult cells can turn into a variety of cell types.
Fat has "certainly been overlooked as a potential source of stem cells," said Dr. Adam Katz, a plastic surgeon who studies fat-derived cells at the University of Virginia. Actually, it's probably the most practical source, he said.
Why?
