The thing about stem cell harvesting is that the chance that your child will actually need its own cells later on is rather small. Actually around 1 in 20000 small. A public stem cell bank is much more useful for everybody. It benefits children who were born too early to have their cells harvested. It may even benefit the old geezers lurking here in slashdot.

Of course, there's a lot of money being made in keeping private stem cell banks working, so there's little hope of convincing people otherwise.

There's actually a pulse even after the umbilical cord is clamped. Pulse in the umbilical cord is generated by the fetus' or baby's heartbeat, not by the placenta. The placenta has no pumping motion.

After the baby is delivered, it is actually not "getting everything it needs" through the placenta. Even were the placenta still attached to the uterine wall, blood flow to that organ diminishes greatly soon after delivery -- otherwise, life threatening maternal blood loss might occur. Of course, an unattached placenta is not contributing with any substantial amount of metabolites to the baby.

As a medical curiosity, I'd like to point out that the first picture of the original article shows a true knot of the umbilical cord. Of course, it's a curiosity and not a tragedy only because the knot wasn't tight enough to kill the fetus.

"Probably" just doesn't cut it. While delayed clamping of the umbilical cord may have a number of benefits to premature newborns, there are several other reasons for neonatal anemia (and hence, your need for a transfusion of RBCs) that have nothing to do with the timing of clamping.

Also, several of the reasons for prematurity may cause birth with low Apgar scores. When a baby is born with low/zero heart rate or does not breathe soon after delivery, keeping it attached to the placenta is not going to give you better results than prompt clamping and institution of proper resuscitation.

Please try to exercise more common sense when you leave your opinions in a public forum. Oh, forget that last sentence, this is slashdot, after all.

The first choice of treatment for neonatal jaundice is a blue light bath. Read the wikipedia article you've referred to more carefully.

If you had bothered to read TFA you would have noticed that they used to tie rocks to string to measure the depth of the oceans. Don't you know anything about string theory? Your precious 20.000 leagues are just too compactified for us to notice.

So what are you worried about then? "Ill newborns born to people too poor (...) or just cursed with bad genes" may survive, but certainly will not procreate, and therefore those "bad genes" will be excluded from the human genetic pool. If their parents are so overstretched that they can't handle their spawn, their reproductive fitness will certainly be lowered. A society that can't ensure the survival of its members, will eventually be replaced by a fitter society. Why do you think that outcome is worse? Natural selection is merciless. Darwin for teh win!

Hey, I'm older than Voyager, you insensitive clod! I've just flipped something at you, and it's not a single memory bit.

yes, but that heat-seeking AABM will need to move even faster, thus generating even more heat, thus making it an easy target for a heat seeking AAABM.

Linux is just a kernel, not my fault if it cannot run x

But it does run X.

I thought glioblastoma multiforme was what killed him.

Whoops, wrong movie/tv series.