WARF patent case gets uglier still
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has lashed out against a group of stem-cell scientists who argue that the Foundation’s patents on human embryonic stem cells are invalid.
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Archive by date: July 2007
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German ethics council: ease restrictions on embryonic stem cell research
Germany's advisory committee on medical ethics has recommended easing restrictions on research with human embryonic stem cells. Current law is more restrictive than the US because researchers cannot work with lines created after 2001 no matter who funds the research. Those that violate the law can face jail and fines. Germans are particularly sensitive to human research ethics because of the egregious experiments during the Nazi era, and the federal funding body initially recommended a cautious approach to allowing the research. It reversed its stance last November. Horst Dreier, a member of the National Ethics Council and head of the group that drafted the proposal, said that several members of parliament plan to take up the matter this fall. Federal research minister Annette Shavan is likely to oppose softening the law, but Dreier thinks she might agree to resetting the ban to allow human embryonic stem cell lines created up until January 1, 2007.
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Surgeon General censored on stem cells
Good scientists are willing to let their beautiful theories be killed by ugly facts, but President Bush is not. Deep in a New York Times article on the ex-Surgeon General’s testimony on political interference comes yet another example of the Bush Administration plugging its collective ears to unpopular data on stem cells.
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Reprogramming breakthrough does not displace ethical debate
Horst-Dietrich Elvers, Burkhard Jandrig, and Christof Tannert write:
The Nature News story “Simple switch turns cells embryonic” (Nature 447, 618-619; 2007) presents the results of three independent research teams showing that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. If this can be successfully adapted to human cells, the creation of human germ cells out of these pluripotent cells should be possible (as was indicated already by Huebner et al. Science 300, 1251-1256, 2003). Now, the road seems to be prepared to create human tissues for therapeutic purposes without using or destructing human embryos. This is, doubtless, an important progress for the whole field of regenerative medicine and avoids many morally questionable decisions, which so far have led to an international mix of regulatory frameworks. Therefore it is not surprising that excitement is overall huge at the moment.
The published results seem to indicate that the ethical problems of human embryo research are solved now.
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Do induced pluripotent stem cells arise from skin stem cells?
In June, widely publicized work from three labs showed that specialized cells could be reprogrammed after transfection with four genes. In this correspondence, James Trosko suggests an alternative explanation, that the reprogrammed cells identified by groups led by Shinya Yamanaka, Rudolf Jaenisch, and Konrad Hochedlinger and Kathrin Plath could in fact be skin stem cells reprogrammed to an embryonic state.
Another thread discusses how reprogramming work alters perceptions of whether dedifferentiation is active or passive, and adds insight from in silico modeling. http://blogs.nature.com/reports/theniche/2007/07/reprogramming_insights_in_sili.html
Below is the email correspondence between the scientists:
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Reprogramming insights: in silico modeling suggests active dedifferentiation
Eric Werner writes:
The recent results of dedifferentiating adult mouse fibroblast cells into stem cells brings into focus the fundamental question of how differentiation and development are controlled. (Cyranoski, D., Nature 447, 618-9; 2007). (Okita, K., et al. Nature doi 10.1038/nature05934, 2007). The fact that just four regulatory genes inserted into cells using viral vectors, can transform normal, differentiated cells into pluripotent stem cells indicates that for some cell types, at least, the process of dedifferentiation is more a process of activation rather than deactivation (Reik, W., Nature 447, 425-32; 2007). Indeed, this falls in line with in silico studies where stem cells, and, more generally, multicellular differentiation and development are modeled on computers.
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