Ready... set... pipette
A big Monday morning announcement is sure to set off a wave of celebration in labs across the US: President Barack Obama today signed an executive order overturning the restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research that had been put into place during the Bush Administration. Obama has reportedly asked the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to draft new guidelines for stem cell research with the next four months.
But as scientists race to figure out how to take advantage of the new opportunities, they will also have to bear in mind that obstacles lie ahead. Specifically, experts worry that the Dickey-Wicker Amendment will be used to create a barrier to embryonic stem cell research. What do you see as the impact of today's announcement?
Photo by Marcn
Comments
Once again, I invite every man of good will, to reflect upon the central problem among all others, different in nature, regarding stem cells study and utilization: Biophysical-Semeiotic Constitutions of the donors! Do yoou know that in Literature there are a lot of cases of osteoporosis and cancer in individuals treated with stem cells, overlooking perfectly these constitutions, i.e., donors mit-DNA and not only n-DNA? Read my critical comments at URLs: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/comments/display?contentID=AR2007041101736&start=41
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080822/full/news.2008.1060.html?q=2#last-comment
http://blogs.nature.com/reports/theniche/2008/06/pfizer_dips_a_toe_into_cell_th.html#comments
Posted by: Sergio Stagnaro | March 11, 2009 02:33 AM
The lift on the ban is certainly good news for research. However, something that has caught my attention at stem-cell meetings is that a good number of researchers have been putting more and more of their eggs in the iPS-cell basket such that developments from the ES-cell front are only of secondary interest to them.
For some of these researchers, the idea of going back to the original ES cells for their work is not particularly appealing, as they now think that the only thing that's holding them back from seriously thinking about using them in regenerative medicine is the low efficiency with which they can be derived. So, to their minds, it's best to focus on solving the efficiency problem than on trying to get ES cells to work from scratch. After all, the lift on the ban does not mean that the ethical dilemmas do not exist any more, and they continue to be troublesome to many.
To my mind, what will be interesting is to see if the lift on the ban is enough to get the pendulum to swing back towards ES-cell research, or if iPS cells will continue gathering momentum at the expense of other approaches. My money? I wouldn't know where to put it at this point.
Posted by: Luca Prodan | March 9, 2009 02:29 PM