Stem Cell Debate Splits House Republicans

[maddezmom]

WASHINGTON - House Republican leaders are throwing their weight behind a bill to encourage stem cell research that uses blood from umbilical cords. The measure offers an alternative to spending government money for research that would destroy human embryos.


House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., had agreed earlier to allow a vote as soon as next week on a bill by Reps. Mike Castle, R-Del., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., to lift President Bush's 2001 ban on the use of federal dollars for research using any new embryonic stem cells lines.

But after Castle and other moderate Republicans angered conservatives by sponsoring polls in their districts on the issue, Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said they would pair the bill with a separate measure to encourage umbilical cord stem cell research.

DeGette on Thursday said the GOP leaders' plan was "a weak attempt to divert support from our bill."

"The bills are completely compatible," she said. She said she intends to vote for both measures and will encourage other members to do the same.

~snip~
more:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050520/ap_on_go_co/stem_cells_congress

[ibid]

1. Good News on Stem Cell Research coming from South Korea

Today's good news from the science front is the South Korean announcement that they have created the world's first human embryonic stem cells that are customized so that they carry the genetic signature of the patient. This is a major step in the quest to grow a patients' own replacement tissue to treat diseases such as spinal cord injury with stem cell transplants. Plus they eliminated the use of mouse "feeder cells", ending worries about mouse DNA contamination (US stem cell work MUST use the mouse "feeder cells" variation under the freeze on creation of stem cell lines imposed by the GOP and President Bush unless and until the proposal by some Democrats for a "therapeutic cloning" exception to the ban on cloning new embryonic stem cells is passed into law). The next step is to learn how to control which types of tissues — brain cells, bones, etc., the stem cells form.


http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/519/1


19 May 2005

Cloning of Human Stem Cells Speeds Up


Scientists have created nearly a dozen new lines of human embryonic stem (ES) cells that for the first time carry the genetic signature of diseased or injured patients. The breakthrough represents a dramatic increase in the efficiency of creating such lines and may eventually pave the way for treating conditions such as spinal cord injury with stem cell transplants.

Last year, a group led by veterinarian Woo Suk Hwang and gynecologist Shin Yong Moon at Seoul National University reported the first derivation of ES cells from human nuclear transfer (Science, 12 March 2004, p. 1669)--a process that involves replacing an oocyte's nucleus with one from a different cell, and then chemically kick-starting development of the egg. But those efforts yielded just one cell line from more than 200 tries.

In the new study, reported online today in Science (article is free with registration), the same team increased their efficiency more than 10-fold and can now derive cell lines in more than 1 in 20 tries. Part of the secret is that they used freshly-harvested oocytes from young, fertile women instead of oocytes left over from fertility treatments. In nine cases, it took only a single donation of oocytes from a woman to produce a new line. Nine of the 11 cell lines are derived from patients who have suffered spinal cord injuries, ranging in age from 10 to 56. The other lines are derived from 2-year-old boy with a genetic immune disorder and a 6-year-old girl with Type-1 diabetes. Hwang cautions that his team remains years away from transplanting the cells into people. "We have to be over-convinced" that the cells are safe, he says. However, the cell line derived from the diabetes patient should be of great interest to scientists.

"The possibility of being able to study disease in a culture dish is very exciting," says Douglas Melton, who has recently received permission from a university ethics committee to derive ES cells from diabetes patients in his laboratory at Harvard. "For the first time, we will have a chance to study the root causes of the disease."
<snip>

[DS1]

2. "research that would destroy human embryos" -- *gets on soapbox*

Nobody is going out and harvesting embryos from unsuspecting women!

:rant:

[rndmprsn]

3. this is a great wedge issue we can use...

[Shallah Kali]

4. It would be if someone had the brains and guts to use it

There are those who usually oppose abortion who are for stem cell research because they or a loved one has a disease or injury that potentially could be cured.

'I don't know how it works'

Dr Huang Hongyun cultivates the cells of aborted foetuses and injects them into the brains and spines of his patients. His method is controversial, but his results have led hundreds of westerners to his Beijing surgery. Jonathan Watts was given unprecedented access to the doctor and his patients

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1363339,00.html

None of these claims has been proven to western scientific standards, but Huang's willingness to think the unthinkable in order to cure the incurable is inspiring hope; so much hope that patients are putting aside ethical qualms, paying tens of thousands of dollars and flying to Beijing to act as his guinea pigs.

Among them is Van Golden, a Christian, anti-abortion Texan who has sold his house so that he can travel to communist, atheist China and have Huang inject a million cells from the nasal area of a foetus into his spine. According to Golden's doctors, his spine was damaged beyond repair in a car crash last Christmas. The damage to his nervous system was so bad that he has been in a wheelchair and racked by spasms ever since. But Golden refused to give up, even if it meant having to compromise his values. "This is the only place that offered us any hope," he says. "Everyone else offered only to help make me sufficient in that chair. But the chair is not my destiny. It is not ordained."

SNIP

It cannot be easy for a man of his beliefs to be in China, where the government's one-child policy is partly responsible for millions of abortions each year. But instead of shunning the system, Golden believes his only hope is to embrace it. There is nowhere else he could get foetal cells. "I wish there was another way they could do it. There are 4,000 abortions a day in the US. Partial-birth ones are murder on a most terrible level. What they are doing here is a whole lot more humane.

"Four thousand a day. That's a waste. Something good should come out of something bad. The people who don't believe that aren't in a wheelchair." The day after we meet him, Golden takes his turn in the operating room, where Laura Fairrie, a film-maker with Guardianfilms, has been given a rare chance to film the controversial procedure.