Obama to End Stem Cell Ban Monday
(HealthDay News) -- President Barack Obama will lift the eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research on Monday, the White House has announced.
A White House ceremony is scheduled for late morning, when Obama will issue an executive order formally removing the federal funding limits imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, in 2001.
And while The New York Times reports that it may take many months for the National Institutes of Health to develop new guidelines for research, researchers were already applauding the president's actions.
"The availability of federal funding for research on cell lines that had been off-limits during the Bush administration, coupled with billions of newly available dollars in federal stimulus money, could set the stage for a tidal wave of support that could propel stem cell research well into the next decade -- if things move quickly," said a prepared statement from Stanford University researchers in California.
"This action is both welcome and overdue," added Dr. Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine and a governing board member of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, in the statement.
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The first paragraph of this article is completely incorrect - and is refuted later in the article. What type of editor would let this pass?
Paragraph 1: "President Barack Obama will lift the eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research on Monday, the White House has announced."
Later: "In 2001, then-president Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research only to human embryonic stem cell lines that already existed."
The second statement is correct - funding was limited (not eliminated) and there was no ban on embryonic stem cell research.
A further distortion of the facts: "Many people object to the use of embryonic stem cells, contending that the research requires the destruction of potential life, because the cells must be extracted from human embryos."
People object to the use of embryonic stem cells contending that the research requires the destruction of ACTUAL human life (not potential). Embryos are destroyed in the process.
Finally, the last paragraph again distorts the issue - many ACTUAL treatments based on adult stem cells are actively in use and people are being successfully treated. Recent tests show that "pluripotent" stem cells can be generated from adult stem cells.
One article...
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867407014717
There is clearly a potential to get the benefit of stem cell treatments without having to deal with the issue that concerns a large part of the population.
It is a sad day in America when we decide that someone's "potential" cure from a disease incurred while having lived...is more important then murdering an innocent life.
You and the person that you replied to are both idiots. It is backwoods, redneck, ignorant people like the two of you that are the reason America is falling behind in technology and science. Feel free to believe whatever it is that you want to believe, but just know that your minority is not guaranteed the right to determine policy for the entire nation.
How is it "backwoods, redneck, [and] ignorant" to KNOW the facts? It is true, adult stem cell research has a high success rate, embryonic stem cell research has ZERO. Why don't you actually do a little research before you "yell" out obscenities. America is not falling behind in technology nor science...that's an opinion not a fact. Furthermore, an embryo is an ACTUAL life, where do you think you started as? Tell me, exactly WHAT kind of embryo are we dealing with? A monkey's? A bird's? No. A HUMAN'S embryo. That is how we ALL start out. So if you tell me that it is just a POTENTIAL life, YOU ARE the one that is "ignorant". And we may be a minority in this country, in this nation, but that does not mean we don't have the power to change the world. It only takes one person at a time.
Any cell from a human is a form of human life. The reason potential is used is such cases is because those cells lack a key element--that being sentience. A blastocyst is not capable of observing its surroundings much less actually feeling any nurturing from a human.