Peyton Manning is undoubtedly one of the best quarterbacks to ever play the game of football and also one of the most famous people to receive stem cell treatments to date. The last few years have been a roller coaster ride for Manning who due to a potential career-ending neck injury, was forced to move on from a team he led to 169 wins and one super bowl championship over 13 seasons. When the Colts did not renew his contract, many people said that Manning’s career was over and that he should retire. However, Manning had other plans.
The Star-Ledger-USA TODAY Sports
As detailed in an article by Paul Mountjoy of The Washington Times, after several surgical procedures proved unsuccessful, Manning turned to stem cell treatments in hopes of getting back to the player he once was. Mountjoy wrote that Manning had to look to Europe for the treatments because they were not available at the time in the United States; a topic we have written about in the past.
Since that time, Peyton Manning has come back again to be arguably the best quarterback in the league this year. Actually, there isn’t much to argue about as Peyton Manning pretty much leads the league in every quarterback statistical category including touchdowns for which he has 29, 10 more than the next quarterback on the list. He has also set 8 franchise records for the Denver Broncos in the last two seasons. Most importantly, the Broncos are 7 and 1 this year, currently the second best record in the National Football League.
What does all of this mean for stem cell treatment and our industry? The answer to this question will likely unfold over the next few years, however it is interesting to consider how such a high-profile case of stem cell treatment will affect the number of people who become aware of and subsequently seek stem cell treatments. Will this in turn affect the availability of funding for research? Will the US government see the success and need for stem cell treatments and facilitate some of the processes to make it easier for stem cell scientists to be successful?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I am certainly thinking about them. I would love to hear comments and thoughts from fellow scientists on this topic. Please leave your comments below.
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Matthew says
This is an evocative and yet utterly informative post. If you are a stem cell scientist who actually works in the field it would have been helpful for you to actually say what kind of stem cells were used, what the procedure was (in summary) etc. Anyone engaged in this field as long as I have been as a policy researcher, administrator and recruiter of talent knows that there are many different kinds of stem cells with many different levels of potential for success in the lab and clinic. This is almost like being back in the 1930s and saying that antibiotic treatments may or may not be useful and we’ll have to see what happens. While true in the largest sense, it totally covers over the ethical, scientific, policy, budgetary, and clinical issues that will truly decide what happens for the various types of stem cell therapy.