Tonight Bush said that he’d provide federal funding for sixty already-available stem cell lines. I’ve never heard of these before. Can anyone give us the straight dope on what he’s talking about?
From the New York Times article:
These “lines” are the daughters of the stem cells harvested from 60 (or a dozen, depending on who’s talking) different human blastocysts (the correct term that politicians and journalists mean when they say “embryo”).
Not all of these blastocysts were harvested in accordance with rules set by the NIH, which included that they be created as part of infertility therapy, that the parents sign release forms, and other more arcane stuff, probably. If these rules weren’t all followed, then research using these lines wasn’t eligible for federal funding.
I haven’t fully digested the news on Bush’s decision, but I believe that he has given the go ahead on federally funded research for these lines, provided they were left over from infertility therapy and not intentionally fertilized to be harvested for stem cells.
And I assume his ethical reasoning goes something along the lines that they will eventually be destroyed regardless, so we might as well get some benefit out of it if the parents want to donate them.
Wow that was fast, Sam. May I offer this stem cell primer to those who need a step up to this topic.
From what I gather, a stem cell line is the ongoing culturing of pluripotent stem cells from an original batch of excess embryos that were obtained from in vitro fertilization clinics. In other words, no new cells need be harvested since there is already an existing line of them from which more can be cultured.
So what I heard Bush say is, don’t go wild and start harvesting human embryos because we already have a sufficient & vaible source of stem cells.
Great link, Attrayant, thank-you. I recommend you all follow it.
That’s what I wondered about… If there are viable lines of cells that can be regenerated, then why do we need to harvest new embryos at all? There must be something to this that I’m missing.
I’m a big fan of progress and technology, and frankly I think the whole issue of embryos being humans is ridiculous. I think the door should be wide open to this kind of research. I’m also in favor of continuing research in cloning. I was terrified that Bush was going to call for a ban on this research. At least he’s kept the door open.
And frankly, that’s probably all that’s required. Because if initial research is promising, and time puts the ‘controversial’ nature of this research behind us, I suspect that more and more types of this research will be allowed.
Sam, check out the following PubMed link.
It is an abstract of a paper on the derivation of embryonic stem cell cultures in vitro. The full text of the article can be obtained from this link. Basically, you can obtain as many cell lines as you want from these cells. It’s just a matter of isolating a clone from the original embryonic cell culture that is capable of reproducing itself in culture while remaining phenotypically stable.
FWIW, as a (former) stem cell biologist, I’m not very happy with GWB’s decision tonight. It’s purely political and very short-sighted. Work is going to be done on embryonic stem cells by private companies anyway; restricting federally-funded researchers from working on them ensures that the government is going to have even less to say on how they are used.
The problem is, we still don’t know enough about how stem cells work. By restricting the research to cell lines derived from them we may overlook some important detail in their biology that may be crucial in their use in treating disease.
Well what did you expect? I think it was complete and total damage control. 100% cop-out. He evaded the ethical issue almost completely and made the decision that alienated the fewest people. Of course it was purely political. He hopes to be re-elected one day.
You can expect next for the conservative lobby to pressure Congress to outlaw private research as well. They’re already doing that on human cloning.