President Clinton is the one who balked at allowing scientists to use government money for embryo creation and research on stem cells harvested from such embryos; Bush only affirmed the Clinton ban. The scientific community has been able to attract nonfederal money for such work, and it is going on all the time in stem cell institutes. Scientists want relief from the inconvenience and expense of keeping that work and the money that supports it separate from federal dollars.Even then, I believe funding was still permitted for stem-cell lines already created before the ban.
There has been good reason for concern about this line of research, and the President should not be in a rush to refund it:
In fact, during the first six weeks of Obama's term, several events reinforced the notion that embryonic stem cells, once thought to hold the cure for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes, are obsolete. The most sobering: a report from Israel published in PLoS Medicine in late February that shows embryonic stem cells injected into patients can cause disabling if not deadly tumors.
The report describes a young boy with a fatal neuromuscular disease called ataxia telangiectasia, who was treated with embryonic stem cells. Within four years, he developed headaches and was found to have multiple tumors in his brain and spinal cord that genetically matched the female embryos used in his therapy.
His experience is neither an anomaly nor a surprise, but one feared by many scientists. These still-mysterious cell creations have been removed from the highly ordered environment of a fast-growing embryo, after all. Though they are tamed in a petri dish to be disciplined, mature cells, research in animals has shown repeatedly that sometimes the injected cells run wildly out of control—dashing hopes of tiny, human embryos benignly spinning off stem cells to save grown-ups, without risk or concern
The slanted press coverage on this issue, which refused to make it clear that it was only funding that was banned, and which raised false hopes by exaggerating the possible benefits of stem cell research on human embryos was largely motivated by political partisanship, and a refusal to give credence to anything remotely pro-life. This did the public a grave disservice, as it directed attention from far more promising stem cell research.
To date, most of the stem cell triumphs that the public hears about involve the infusion of adult stem cells. We've just recently seen separate research reports of patients with spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis benefiting from adult stem cell therapy. These cells have the advantage of being the patient's natural own, and the worst they seem to do after infusion is die off without bringing the hoped-for benefit. They do not have the awesome but dangerous quality of eternal life characteristic of embryonic stem cells.
Exciting stuff, and so is this story on research using stem cells created from skin cells:
The breakthrough came when two scientists on opposite sides of the Atlantic discovered they’d solved different halves of the same puzzle. In Edinburgh, a team of scientists led by Dr. Keisuke Kaji from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Regenerative Medicine, successfully injected the four crucial genes in one single fragment of DNA. But Kaji’s team also needed to remove the genes after reprogramming the cells—to avoid abnormalities in the cells’ development—and they hadn’t yet figured out how to do this. Meanwhile, a team led by Dr. Andras Nagy from the University of Toronto developed a reprogramming system that allowed for removing the genes; yet because his team delivered the genes into four different parts of the genome, they hadn’t yet figured out how to remove all of them.Pin It
By chance, Kaji and Nagy ended up meeting and combined their efforts, using Kaji’s system of inserting the genes into one fragment of DNA and Nagy’s “footprint-less” removal system. Before this study, non-viral methods for reprogramming skin cells had only worked on mice. This is the first time they’ve worked on human skin cells.
