Word: stemming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...investigators aren't so much developing cures as creating research and manufacturing techniques. For that, the specific cell lines aren't important. "This will enable the biomedical community to iron out the molecular biology of these cells," says Dr. Thomas Okarma, CEO of the biotech firm Geron, which finances stem-cell pioneer James Thomson as well as John Gearhart, "and that doesn't turn on one cell line vs. another...
Other people are troubled not by what the Bush ruling may do to the science but by what it may do to America's standing in the world. The U.S. was embarrassed once this summer when stem-cell researcher Roger Pederson of the University of California, San Francisco--fed up with all the hand-wringing and rulemaking--was seduced overseas by Cambridge University in England. This, of course, may be just an isolated defection rather than the start of a national brain drain. "I'm not packing," quips Thomson, who pronounced himself pleased that the feds would finally make some...
There are, to be sure, ways around the federal rules. Nothing prevents scientists who are working with forbidden stem cells from talking to--and sharing information with--those working with approved lines. And when scientists publish their work, anyone can read it. Institutions that receive federal funds are not absolutely limited in the work they can do as long as work that falls outside the White House ban is conducted independently, with no commingling of funds or facilities or--more important--cell lines...
Conservatives were heartened last week when President Bush appointed Dr. Leon Kass, an eminent University of Chicago bioethicist, to head an advisory panel on stem-cell research. Kass's visibility was already on the rise. He'd been morphing from political thinker to political player, largely because of his passionate opposition to human cloning. He has written two widely read articles on the topic for the New Republic and testified persuasively before Congress. In July he attended a crucial meeting at which Bush moved toward his decision to allow only limited federal funding of stem-cell research...
While Kass has made his views against cloning well known--simply put, he believes it robs us of our humanity--he has been more opaque on the issue of stem cells. "I regard it as a deeply vexing and serious moral question," he told the New York Times. Daniel Callahan, a colleague who attended the July Oval Office meeting, says he does not recall Kass's coming down one way or the other. "He seemed somewhat ambivalent on the topic," says Callahan. In one of his anticloning articles, however, Kass appears to oppose embryonic research in general. "By pouring...