Word: celling
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Melton faced mounting political pressure too. In 2004, voters in California approved a measure providing $3 billion in state funding to embryonic-stem-cell research. That threatened to draw scientists in the stem-cell community west, and Melton took pains to foster a "band of brothers" mentality. "I tried to create a cocoon here," he says, "and tell people that your job is to focus on the science. Don't worry what the politicians say." By then, Melton's team was one of only a handful in the country working on embryonic stem cells and was making headway in teasing...
...there for his Ph.D. work, studying under Sir John Gurdon - the first to clone a frog. At Harvard, Melton teaches a frequently oversubscribed undergraduate course on science and ethics, in which he uses his keen sense of logic to provoke. When the class discussed the morality of embryonic-stem-cell research, Melton invited Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to present arguments against the field. Melton asked Doerflinger if he considered a day-old embryo and a 6-year-old to be moral equivalents; when Doerflinger responded yes, Melton countered by asking why society accepts the freezing...
Clearly, Melton does not shrink from a fight. As Washington's squeeze on stem-cell research tightened in the early part of this decade, he decided to take action, providing life support for what remained of the U.S. stem-cell community. Not convinced that an entire field could make much progress relying on a few dozen cell lines of questionable quality, in 2004 he used funds HSCI receives from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as from Harvard alumni, and developed a more streamlined method for generating stem-cell lines from embryos...
...Doug drew a line in the sand," says Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the organization charged with dispensing state money for embryonic-stem-cell research. "He turned the tables on an Administration that was incredibly negative toward stem cells and showed [it] we are not going to tolerate being put out of this field by ideological views that we don't think are correct." Melton's motivation was, again, both professional and intensely personal. Two months after Bush announced his ban, Melton's daughter Emma, then 14, also received a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes...
...part owing to the restrictive U.S. policy, the momentum in stem-cell research seemed to shift overseas. In 2004, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk announced that he had generated the first human embryonic stem cells from healthy people - and in the following year, from afflicted patients themselves - using an abbreviated cloning method. The latter feat would mean that cardiac patients could essentially donate themselves a healthy new heart without fear of rejection...