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

Posted by Roxanne Khamsi at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A boy who received human fetal stem cell injections developed benign tumors in his brain and spinal cord four years after the stem cell treatment began, researchers reported in PLoS Medicine last week. Doctors at an unrelated clinic in Russia had apparently used the stem cell injections to try to treat the boy for a rare genetic disease called ataxia telangiectasia. Upon examining the surgically removed spinal cord tumor, the scientists determined that the tumor arose from the stem cells of at least two donors. The tumor was composed of both female and male cells and the tumor cells had two normal copies of the gene that causes ataxia telangiectasia when mutated.

As the first documented case of human neural fetal stem cell injections leading to tumor growth, this story has captured media attention worldwide -- spurring discussions on how the safety of stem cell therapies should be evaluated. A Scientific American blog noted that researchers don’t yet fully understand how to control the development of such stem cells in the brain, while a BBC story highlighted the need to regulate stem cell therapy centers. Many sources explained the boy’s condition may have facilitated tumor growth, but US News and World Report was among the few that noted the rarity of this side effect. As for the authors of the article, they recommended more research on stem cell therapy safety, but did not suggest halting stem cell research.

Photo from PLoS Medicine, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000029.g002

Posted by Kirsten Dorans at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John McCain is not talking straight about stem cells in these last days of the campaign. In the last presidential debate he emphatically voiced his support for "stem cell research." Given that he conveniently left off the word "embryonic" that's kind of like emphatically supporting the right of Joe the Plumber to hire a publicist.

McCain seems to have studiously avoided that distasteful word for the last few months. So have his emissaries, such as health care advisor Jay Khosla. Here is a video of Khosla at a debate with Obama's advisor Dora Hughes at Georgetown University last month, which I attended. In response to a direct question, Khosla ties himself in knots and fails to define McCain's position.

A McCain stem cell ad also avoids the word, and this week his campaign did not clarify its position to the Wisconsin State Journal, which tracks issue because James Thomson, the first researcher to isolate human embryonic stem cells, is at the University of Wisconsin.

There's nothing controversial about supporting stem cell research. What is controversial is research on stem cells derived from human embryos. Currently, federal funding is banned for embryonic stem cell lines derived after August 9, 2001.

McCain voted twice to reverse the ban. And in September, he told ScienceDebate2008 that he supported federal funding for embryonic stem cell research—although he did not clarify whether he supported expanding funding beyond the few tired and increasingly useless stem cell lines allowed under current policy.

More recently, he's chosen a running-mate opposed to such research. And he didn’t stop the Republican party from calling, in its new platform, for a "ban on all embryonic stem-cell research, public or private.”

McCain seems to want it both ways. He wants to reassure supporters of embryonic stem cell research, which happen to be the majority of US citizens, that he supports science—while at the same time sending signals to the anti-abortion right wing that he's on their side.

That strategy seems to have worked. Few scientists or journalists seem to have called McCain on his slippery position, although there are some exceptions. And, judging from a few websites, it looks like the anti-abortion advocates may be feeling more comfortable with McCain's stem cell positions these days.

Embryonic stem cells offer a more promising source of potential therapies than adult stem cells, which McCain and his advisors prefer to talk about. Obama, in constrast, has been clear on his support for expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

McCain is counting on the fact that most people don't really even know what a stem cell is. What he's probably not counting on is that people don't like being condescended to.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Today's announcement that the British Prime Minister is ready to compromise and have a free vote on parts of his government's embryo research proposal is disappointing.

Britain has traditionally taken a much broader view of stem-cell research than, say, the US. So, for Gordon Brown to yield under the pressure from Catholic MPs, who had threatened to step down if a vote was not held, is nothing short of a step backwards.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Bill has to do with the generation of "cybrids" or "admix" embryos generated by injecting a human nucleus into an animal egg. Critics of the Bill cite ethical concerns. For example, Cardinal Keith O'Brien (Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh) stated that "It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which more comprehensively attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill", and that the Bill could lead to experiments of "Frankenstein proportions".

Needeless to say, supporters of the Bill have urged the Catholic church to become more familiar with the facts before making such strong statements. In fact, if you look at what a cybrid really is and realize that it's something that may or may not even be successful, the alarms set off by opponents of the Bill seem rather out of proportion. (See this correspondence from MIT's Richard Hynes that we published some time ago, in which he clarifies the terminology and dismisses some of the most erroneous concerns about the generation of chimeras, hybrids and cybrids.)

Clearly, the Prime Minister's decision to compromise is political, and he sounds confident that the Bill will pass as intended despite the objections from the rebel MPs. Hopefully his gamble is correct, and we don't have to live through another case of science taking a backseat to religion.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ahead of a meeting with a representative from the recently-formed UK Research Integrity Office, I sorted through my file of papers on research misconduct. Amongst them I found a ‘News in Brief’ page from Nature Medicine, 2005 . On it, I found the headline that had caused me to photocopy the page – “Many scientists admit to misconduct”, drawing attention to a paper in its sister publication Nature published a month earlier. The paper described a survey in which it was revealed that one in three scientists has committed some type of scientific misconduct.

The irony was that at the bottom of the same page was a short piece (from the same correspondent, Emily Singer) announcing “South Korean chalks up another stem cell victory”. The article highlighted the work of Woo-Suk Hwang in which he claimed to have cloned human embryonic stem cells in a paper published two months earlier in Science. The disgraced Professor, formerly of Seoul National University, is now used as a case-study for fraud in research (for example, Fraud Advisory Panel Occasional paper 01/07 Fraud in Research: Is it new or just not true?).

Was this incredible prescience on the part of the author, or just a strange coincidence of publishing?

Posted on behalf of Dr. Dave Wilson, Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the stem-cell field. First, Nature's paper on the production of primate embryonic stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer. Today, the papers in Cell and Science showing that transducing human fibroblasts with four transcription factors can lead to the production of pluripotent stem cells, a feat previously achieved using mouse fibroblasts.

In the midst of all the excitement elicited by these papers, which are getting substantial global attention, I got a press release from the "Center for Genetics and Society" (CGS) that, in relation to the generation of human pluripotent cells, quoted their policy analyst Jesse Reynolds as saying:

“If these results are as promising as they appear to be, they significantly undermine the case for cloning-based stem cell research”.

Let me get this straight. Does this mean that, just because it was possible to generate human pluripotent cells after transduction of somatic cells with, not one, but four different genes, we should ponder the possibility of not pursuing cloning-based stem cell research? Well, I don't know about that. Have we not learned any lessons from the unfortunate deaths of some participants in gene therapy trials and the fact that transduced genes have a way of inserting themselves in undesirable places?

Elsewhere on their website, in a statement the CGS issued after the production of monkey stem cells, the Center's Associate Executive Director Marcy Darnovsky makes the following comment on the prospects of personalized treatments derived from stem cells:

"The personal-repair-kit approach to stem cell research is far-fetched. To the extent that researchers and their advocates still claim that cloning techniques will lead to personalized stem cell treatments, they should recognize that – even if these are someday technically possible – they would be enormously expensive, and thus would likely worsen our already shameful health disparities".

Surely this argument would apply to pretty much any scientific and technological advance, wouldn't it? Would everyone be able to afford a prosthetic leg or a full treatment schedule with an anti-tumor antibody?

I find it paradoxical that the publication of the advances I mentioned above should be accompanied by calls for less, instead of more, work on embryonic stem cells. To point to social inequalities as an argument against stem cell-based regenerative therapies is as mistaken as thinking that the transduction approach could replace research on embryonic stem cells. You can see a glass as half empty or half full, but you cannot say that, as it is only half full, we might as well empty it.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Korea's disgraced cloning researcher, Woo-suk Hwang is apparently back in the lab, according to an exclusive from the Associated Press.

The article says Hwang and 30 of his former colleagues have set up shop outside Seoul and are hard at work deriving stem cell lines from pig and cow embryos. One of the scientists is quoted as saying what a pity it is that they can't get their hands on human eggs—to which my response is "Chuh!"

In case you've forgotten, Hwang is the scientist who sucecssfully hoodwinked the whole world into believing first that his team had successfully derived embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo and then that they had created 11 patient-specific stem cell lines from people with different diseases. And they claimed to have done all this using eggs from willing volunteers, 242 eggs the first time and 185 the second.

It was all a big scam, of course. Much to everyone's utter shock, there were no such cell lines. And and as it turned out later, Hwang had in fact used more than 2,000 eggs, and in many cases had either paid, duped or coerced women—including two graduate students in his lab—into donating them.

What I'm still shocked by is these 30 scientists who are still putting their faith in him. But maybe I shouldn't be. Hwang was so good at seeming like the humble man of science, even playing the Asian card at times, that no one suspected a thing for years.

My colleague at Nature, David Cyranoski, first reported the ethical violations in May 2004, a year and a half before Hwang's collaborator Gerald Schatten raised an alarm. During that time, most scientists believed that Nature had cooked up the allegations over jealousy that Hwang had chosen to publish in Science, a theory Hwang himself had floated. But as I reported in May 2005, some people in Korea saw him as a two-faced manipulator who "sells himself very well," long before the West caught on.

It's disturbing to see that Hwang still hasn't given up on human eggs and cloning. Here's hoping the government makes sure he he has to stick to pigs and cows.

Posted by at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the second time in less than a year, US President Bush has vetoed a bill that would have lifted a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Bush announced his veto last Wednesday saying, “If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos. I made it clear to Congress and to the American people that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line.”

Whether he likes it or not, that already happens on a regular basis.

A 2004 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics found that nearly all in vitro fertilization clinics harvest more embryos than they’ll need and about 80% of the clinics dispose of unwanted embryos—most by simply dumping the extras in the biological waste bin.

It's too bad decisions about what happens to an embryo are being made by the government and not by the women and men who are most connected—both emotionally and genetically—to those embryos. According to a survey released in last week’s Science, 60% of couples who have embryos stored at fertility clinics said they would willingly donate them for stem cell research. A Gallup poll conducted in mid May also found that 64% of Americans think embryonic stem cell research is morally acceptable.

Whether these taxpayers are funding stem cell research or not, they’ve already made it clear that they’re ready to cross Bush’s moral line. Listening, President Bush?

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, news intern for Nature Medicine

Posted by at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Let's hear it for Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. He came out strongly in support of stem cell research at a Senate hearing this Monday, bucking the official line of the Bush administration.

"It is in the best interests of our scientists, our science, our country," he said, "that the nation finds a way to allow the science to go full speed on both adult and embryonic stem cell research." Zerhouni also denounced the notion that adult stem cells hold just as much promise as embryonic stem cells.

Whether the NIH director is being flogged right now in a back room at the White House is unclear. But administration officials were quick to try and repair the damage. “There was only one moral line the President said that he would not cross," said a White House spokesperson, "and that is that federal taxpayer dollars should not be used in the destruction of embryos.”

A few years ago, when stem cells seemed the biggest thing on the President’s agenda, Zerhouni’s statement might have caused a massive uproar. But now it seems that it’s getting lost in all the other dramas going on, from the Scooter Libby trial to the Supreme Court case on “Bong hits 4 Jesus.” Maybe, just maybe, there’s change—or at least rebellion—brewing on the stem cell front. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to what happens next.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)