Bush Policy Blocks Efforts To Make Stem Cells Without Harming Embryos

[babylonsister]

Future of Stem Cell Tests May Hang on Defining Embryo Harm

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 29, 2007; Page A08

With the active encouragement of the Bush administration, U.S. scientists in the past year have developed several methods for creating embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos.

But some who now wish to test their alternatively derived cells have found themselves stymied by an unexpected barrier: President Bush's stem cell policy.

The 2001 policy says that federal funds may not be used to study embryonic stem cells created after Aug. 9 of that year. It is based on the assumption that the only way to make the cells is by destroying human embryos -- a truism in 2001 but not any longer.

As a result, the National Institutes of Health recently refused to consider a grant application for what would have been the first federal study to compare several of the new, less politically contentious stem cell lines.

"This is not the way to make good health policy," said Robert Lanza, the frustrated vice president for research and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass. Lanza submitted the study proposal with stem cell experts from several major research labs.

Upcoming changes in the NIH's stem cell funding rules may eventually help resolve that problem. But agency officials and others say the policy tangle is more complicated than that. Although Lanza's technique and other new approaches do not destroy embryos, they may run afoul of a long-standing congressional ban on studies that "harm" human embryos.

That vague language raises the perplexing question of how one would know whether an embryo had been harmed.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/28/AR2007072800993.html?hpid=topnews

[C_U_L8R]

1. Most ignorant president ever !