Could stem cells one day transform Walsall?
There are times here in France when I feel like a harassed actor in a one-man show: the number of costume changes required on an hourly basis is getting beyond a joke. This morning it was like February again, just more grey. At lunchtime, the sun blasted the stone. In the late afternoon what I call Walsall drizzle sprayed down, and this evening it’s bloody freezing again.
There’s still plenty of evidence of Spring: I went to the tabac this morning, and Madame was selling local punnets of strawberries. Not those hard ones with yellow bottoms that journey up slowly from Spain in the hope that they’ll ripen….these were a luscious post-office red, and yielded delightfully to the bite. Most of the fruit trees in the garden are at or near blossom. Small, new geckos are darting about, and the honeysuckle is making progress. But Spring isn’t in the air. In the air, there is only a chill.
Personally, I blame the parents. Or the Tories. Or Global Warming. The weather. Aliens. And Goldman Sachs. It has to be one of them, because I am that French cop told by Claude Rains to round up the usual list of suspects – and believe me, they’re all there. This lot are to blame for everything. The only things missing from the list are stem cells, and they aren’t going to f**k up anything, they’re going to cure every illness on the planet.
There was a point towards the end of 2010 when, no matter what medical tragedy you might bring up in company, someone would say, “Once they crack the stem cells thing, that’ll be a thing of the past”. The prediction was applied to everything from death to split ends. Stem cells make Kryptonite look just so pissypants by comparison. Did you know stem cells can be in two places at once, and grow a mile high in a week? Well then, there you are.
Type ‘what are stem cells?’ into Google and you get ‘Plural of stem cell’. I love asking Google questions: I feel like a tired detective in Z Cars asking some old lag who did the H. Samuel jewellery job. “Someone with no taste,” answers the lag. But there are also 56 million other sites from which to choose, and this is the sort of thing they have to say about stem cells:
‘Stem cells are biological cells found in all multicellular organisms, that can divide (through mitosis) and differentiate into diverse specialized cell types and can self-renew to produce more stem cells. In mammals, there are two broad types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells, which are isolated from the inner cell mass of blastocysts, and adult stem cells, which are found in various tissues. In adult organisms, stem cells and progenitor cells act as a repair system for the body, replenishing adult tissues. In a developing embryo, stem cells can differentiate into all the specialized cells (these are called pluripotent cells), but also maintain the normal turnover of regenerative organs, such as blood, skin, or intestinal tissues.’
See what I mean? They really are clever little blighters, and no mistake. This is cloning on an industrial scale, but what’s even more neat is that they can start out as an anus ring, and become absolutely anything. It’s true. The experiments began back in 1968, and Jeremy Hunt is the result. Kim Jong Un was going to be another. They tried to fashion Kim from arse-cells, but they rejected him. In the end they had to stick his single-cell embryo to a toenail with superglue. Have you seen him walk? It shows.
Those are examples of what we expert analysts call ‘unforeseen consequences’. But I bet there are others from using stem cells. What, for example, if they find that the process can reverse, and the MP from Rottenburgh North’s brain goes back to being a wart? Suddenly, he’d be Ed Balls. What if Ed Balls’s balls were repaired and reverted to being buttocks? He’d look as if he was going backwards while walking forwards. He’d be upfront but all behind.
I bet you’re wondering why I took a cheap shot at Walsall eight paragraphs ago. Even if you’re not, I’m going to tell you why anyway, because I have a real thing about Walsall. To be fair, it’s 47 years since I was there, but it seems like yesterday – and you can only do so much in half a century.
If the good burghers are trying to improve Walsall, then by the looks of things (left) there’s room for improvement in the ongoing improvement process. That’s the new Walsall Art Gallery. To me, it looks for all the world like something the European Commission might build to house Herman van Rompuy’s Japanese poems. The brief given to the architect was “Make Herman’s poems look good”.
Like Ed Balls with his bottom on back-to-front, Walsall is one of those places that has been boldly going backwards architecturally for a century or more. If you look at Edwardian pictures of the place, it actually looks quite nice. But somewhere along the line, the fashion for building stuff that was ‘in keeping’ came along – and as when that happened Walsall looked like a toilet, what the citizenry got was more of the same.
This is the main NHS hospital. It’s a clever idea – cut down admissions and thus create bedspace by making people prefer to die in a gutter quietly somewhere else – but it doesn’t really work unless you’re into retro school extension circa 1959.
So part of the reason I’ve never been back to Walsall is that it’s a dump. But the other one is that, when I went there on this early journalistic assignment in 1967, I spent an evening in a pub interviewing blokes who were keen on whippet racing. By halfway through the evening, I was interviewing old ladies about plastic corrugated hair-covers. By closing time I was interviewing the beermats. It was that exciting.
I was also as drunk as a skunk, with no money for a bus back to Birmingham….and full of beer. So full of beer that it felt like an overactive hydraulic ram pump was forcing whole reservoirs into my bladder. In 1967, every public lavatory in Walsall closed at 10.29 pm. Or put another way, just as every sphincter in town wanted to relax and let fly. So to avoid turning into The Human Dirigible, I had to pee in a back alley. It was obvious from the lingering odour that I wasn’t the first chap to have had this idea.
There are worse places on the planet than Walsall. I’m told Hahare has gone downhill in recent years; and no doubt the big problem for those marketing Woggawarra as a destination is the dearth of repeat business. But fear not Walsall, for victory will be yours: stem cells are coming, and stem cells can do practically anything. In fact, in honour of the potential for good that stem cells enjoy, I have penned this short verse in the style of Herman van Rompuy’s most execrable attempt at haiku to date:
O tiny little miracle, invisible to the naked eye, and even one fully clothed in strong spectacles,
I used to think you were made from plants and that, but clearly I was misinformed.
How you fill me with wonder, as opposed to nine pints of Dudley Brewery’s Old Cassock.
To think that at some time in the future waiting for us after the present is finished and it is no longer now any more,
we could take cells from Michael Gove’s brain and make enough new bottoms for anyone who ever sat on a bacon slicer –
and ensure that everyone lives until long after the future is finished and mutates into something else or other.
Oh, how empty Heaven will be then!
Oh, how much more intimate will all humans be, as they stand shoulder to shoulder,
unable to move, their noses pointing skywards and inhaling desperately, without the energy to ask
which idiot called this blindingly obvious outcome an unforeseen consequence.
Sadly, I am reliably informed that no stem cell yet discovered could help in the process of stopping Mr van Rompuy from spouting oxymoronic drivel whenever his lips move. In fact, the real and present danger here is that his cells might somehow got into the stem pool.
Cue lots of threads and emails from Walsall Council, stem cells, and the European commission.
The Slog 