Posted on 03/10/2009 9:45:11 AM PDT by reaganaut1
With soaring oratory, President Obama on Monday removed a substantial practical nuisance that has long made life difficult for stem cell researchers. He freed biomedical researchers using federal money (a vast majority) to work on more than the small number of human embryonic stem cell lines that were established before Aug. 9, 2001.
...
However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.
For therapy, far off as that is, treating patients with their own cells would avoid the problem of immune rejection.
Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells."
Isn't taking money under false pretenses fraud?
is all the money congress is spending a fraud?
Imagine a researcher writing up application for a govt grant:
“I intend to achieve modest goals”
Question??? Can anyone name a scientific/medical cure that was directly funded by the government? Seriously....objectively... ! All these leftists are orgasmic now about government funding embryonic stem cell research....what has government funded that was a medical cure or breakthrough? Anybody know?
Is this the NYT saying Bush was right?
Is the 'fraud' spending all the money a congress?
1. Obama says that the NIH is to prepare guidelines for funding embryonic stem cell research "to the extent permitted by law." No other guidance is presented except for his rescinding of the Bush policy. And any guidelines are to be consistent with this order.
That means NIH is allowed (and some may say, REQUIRED) to go to the full extent of what is permitted by law, including funding for research on stem cells obtained by specially creating human embryos for research and then destroying them. Funding of such stem cell research is not blocked by the Dickey amendment, as long as the creating and destroying of embryos is itself done with non-federal funds.
Even the legislation passed by the last Congress and vetoed by President Bush did not go this far, but was very specific in restricting the funding to "excess" embryos created originally for reproduction.
The last time the NIH had an opportunity to say what policy it would really like, in 1994, it wanted funding for the full gamut of embryo (an ethical line that even President Clinton was not willing to cross). Now President Obama seems to have given the NIH carte blanche.
2. Obama has gratuitously revoked the Executive Order of 2007 that encourages the NIH to explore sources of pluripotent stem cells that do NOT involve destroying human embryos. There was not a need in the world to do this, as the order was entirely positive and did not place any additional restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. That order led to funding for new alternative techniques, one of which -- the reprogramming of ordinary adult cells into "induced pluripotent stem cells" -- has just been hailed by the journal Science as the greatest scientific breakthrough of last year.
(Remember that one of the two groundbreaking studies making this advance, by Dr. James Thomson, was funded by the NIH, as were some later studies refining the technique and showing its benefits.)
The scientists have been saying that these iPS cells have very distinct SCIENTIFIC advantages over stem cells from destroying embryos, besides resolving the ethical problem -- and the order that gave this avenue attention and funding has been revoked, by an Administration claiming to advance "science."
ping
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