Stem cells are simply cells that have a lot of potential – they retain the possibility to follow diverse programs to become all sorts of cells, and are not committed to one path. This is what makes them so exciting for everyone – the researchers working on them, and the patients hoping to reap some truly new clinical benefits.
The International Society for Stem Cell Research has just issued a press release which accurately reflects biologists’ happiness that the ill-guided U.S. federal policy in place since August 9th, 2001 thanks to former president Bush and his particularly backward ideology, has now been rescinded by current President Obama.
Time already has an article replete with anecdotes from top stem cell researchers.
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Edit on March 12th:
As would be expected, Erika Hayden wrote a great piece for Nature about the overturn, complete with a live interview with Ellen Robey and members of her laboratory in California (whom I knew at Cal! Hi, Ellen!). In the article, I particularly appreciated Ms. Hayden’s interviews of stem cell researchers from other locations around the world. Nothing is truer than:
“This type of science is international, and the whole world has suffered from the previous short-sighted and rather bizarre policy,” says Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research in London.
I had also run into a former classmate from Wellesley at last year’s meeting for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, who is now Executive Director of the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee Board at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). The CIRM is what enabled laboratories like Ellen Robey’s and others in California to continue contributing to cutting-edge stem cell research during the last eight-year desert.
My point is – go, CIRM! go, Wellcome Trust! go, Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale! go, Max Planck Society! As a scientist, I’m thrilled that my options for funding remain as open as possible. Not everything in science has to be funded by a government, although countries with successful science productions always have a significant government stake in that production. It seems to me that the most productive countries for biomedical research, in any case, have both that important participation from the public sector and more than one powerful non-profit alternative source of funding. So I hope that just because the NIH pipes have been unblocked for stem cell research, does not toll the death knell for the CIRM – it is still needed, for that independent push.
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Further update:
Science has also reported on the passing of the previous restricted era in stem cell research.
The development of iPS cells, ES-like pluripotent cells that can be grown without the destruction of embryos, has removed some of the intense pressure for scientists to have access to ES cells, and Gearhart himself is using iPS cells. Nonetheless, he says he still needs ES cells to study the mechanisms of embryogenesis and as a standard against which to compare iPS cells.
It is indeed good news. It will be interesting to see whether he manages to bring about enacting legislation to prevent the possibility of this order being revoked in future.
Much as that would be a good idea(!), I am not sure it will be possible or even politically desirable from Obama’s point of view. He’s held a campaign promise, and if the field has evolved in the next four years as much as one might hope, then it will indeed be the Pandora’s box that its detractors say it is – and no possibility of going back. But with much hope at the bottom, nonetheless.
One interesting bit of fallout was a conversation I had this afternoon with a U.S. collaborator. Apparently it’s feeding frenzy at the zoo, with a large influx of NIH money to distribute quickly – and we had just submitted an NIH grant on a specific request for applications. So my collaborator was very happy to talk about adapting that to include possible import of our stem cell lines, which although they are not “embryonic stem cells” are still human, embryonic, stem cells. If you can get DNA methylation and stem cells and human genetics into the same package, she said, that’s downright sexy. Brainstorm alert ahead…
It’s nice to see politicians taking advice from well qualified people and acting on it, it doesn’t always work that way.
A couple of related thoughts immediately sprang to mind when I heard this news: 1. It’s a bit late now that the use of iPSC is exploding, and 2. I wonder how much influence the ES cell ban had on driving the development of iPSC technology?
The ES cell ban probably had a lot to do with the development of iPSC lines of inquiry – but let us not forget that iPSC experiments trace their lineage in part back to cloning experiments and in particular, among many, a totipotent carrot root cell nuclear transfer by FC Steward back in 1958. And people have been studying limb regeneration (and the blastema’s “dedifferentiation”) for a good century. iPS cells are not identical to ES cells in their tissue engineering aspects, so it’s not too late to keep all lines of inquiry open.
I also wanted to get back to Lee in that there was a Presidential memorandum only yesterday along the lines of protecting scientific integrity from political fashions and opportunism. Time will tell if it is effective.