Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Korean stem cell rout...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 1/1/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
>
> The Korean researcher claimed to have cloned human cells, cloned a dog and
> produced human stem cells from cloned tissue.  He probably made it all up.
> So this means that we are stuck using frozen embryos, but not in the US
> where GWB in his infinite wisdom has decided that they should be thrown in
> the trash instead.

That's not exactly correct.  Bush's executive order only affects
research funded by the federal government. Some states, most notably
California, have decided on very different policies.  To be sure, it's
not reasonable to say that Bush's decision has no effect on the amount
or kind of research being done; the lack of NIH funding for this work
has a profound effect.  Now, an interesting point here is that the
presumed Korean advances in stem cell technology had panicked some
people both in the US and elsewhere: if ground-breaking progress was
about to be made in therapeutic cloning or other uses of stem cells,
the ban on US funding might seem even more worrisome.  The reality of
the situation, as I'm aware of it right now, is that we are indeed
making a lot of progress with animal models for stem cell procedures
we eventually might want to try in people, but there is still a long
way to go before we've got actual treatments for real diseases in
humans.  Not so much of the research in stem cell biology is
translational at the moment, so the effect *today* is not so great.

I now Mike is really annoyed by Bush's order, and I am, too.  But what
annoys me most was the fact that Bush was told that we did not, in
fact, have really enough existing stem cell lines to support near- to
mid-term research as a matter of fact, but Bush claimed that we did. 
In retrospect, it was one of the first well-known cases where the
administration twisted or invented facts so that they appeared to
support a policy position that was developed independently of the
facts.

jking

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