Word: stemming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stem-cell debate is a moral minefield, and legislative activity doesn't necessarily lead to law, even when there's popular support. In Maryland last month, pro-life state senators blocked a vote on a bill that would have allowed state funding for research even though the bill had the backing to pass. In Texas, four pieces of pro-research legislation, including a proposal from state representative Senfronia Thompson to create a $900 million Texas Institute for Regenerative Medicine, never emerged from the purgatory of committee. Thompson says her legislation is "as dead as dead...
...even the most enthusiastic states can do. In California, where scientists' morale is perhaps the highest, worries linger about the lack of federal backing and the possibility that Congress could someday trump state law with nationwide restrictions. That discourages some young scientists who are deciding whether to specialize in stem-cell work. "Students are scared to commit," says Hans Keirstead, a spinal-cord researcher at the University of California at Irvine. "They don't know if the laws are going to change, and I can't fully dispel those fears...
Keirstead is doing his best by demonstrating the field's potential. He and his team published details earlier this month of how they helped paralyzed rats walk again by using human embryonic stem cells to aid regeneration of spinal-cord tissue. That is a tiny step, at best, toward therapies for people but, Keirstead says, "I've never seen anything that looks as good as the human embryonic stem cell." He can only hope that policymakers, too, will agree. --By Jeff Chu. With reporting by Eric Ferkenhoff/ Chicago, Elisabeth Kauffman/ Nashville and Terry McCarthy/ Los Angeles
...toughest call of his young presidency, and George Bush chose an event no less momentous than his first prime-time address to announce that he had found a thin ridge of moral high ground on which to perch. The wrenching decision: whether to lend federal support to embryonic-stem-cell research, unleashing potential cures for horrific illnesses and life-shattering injuries, but at the cost of giving government sanction to the destruction of human embryos. Bush had searched both his soul and his 3-in.-thick briefing book. He had quizzed experts and ethicists and even the doctors...
...middle of an argument that he had declared settled. As early as next week, the Republican-controlled House--the same House that held a Palm Sunday session so that it could deliver a lifeline to Terri Schiavo--is expected to consider legislation that could dramatically expand the number of stem-cell "lines" available to federally funded research by making accessible tens of thousands of embryos that have been created through in vitro fertilization. The bill contains a number of safeguards aimed at ensuring that it would apply only to embryos that would otherwise have been discarded. It stipulates that...