US Stem Cells Contaminated

Croaking Toad writes "According to The Register, US-based scientists using stem cells has hit a brick wall. The stem cells apparently have been contaminated for quite a while with animal proteins rendering them useless in the treatment of human illnesses. New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the USA by a 2001 Executive Order from President Bush." To be precise, stem cell harvesting wasn't outlawed; the usage of federal funding was outlawed. Several states and research institutions have been using their own money to undertake research. The AP coverage is up as well. Update: 01/24 19:40 GMT by J : Carl Zimmer has a fascinating description of the sugars we humans lack that contaminated the stem cell lines. What a curious genetic heritage we have...

Comments

This is news?

[Enry]

This was mentioned back in the Presidential debates. Bush said we have X Stem Cell Lines available, while Kerry said that the available lines are contaiminated with mouse DNA and probably other DNA.

Stem cell harvesting not outlawed.

[Greg@RageNet]

New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the USA by a 2001 Executive Order from President Bush.

This is slashdot, with the journalistic integrity of Dan Rather.. I should not have expected any different.

Stem cell harvesting is not illegal, so harvest away. What you can't do accoring to that 2001 executive order is harvest stem cells and expect the government to pay for it. It's like saying Bush outlawed cars because he won't buy you one.

That's fine with me anyway, it's beyond me why the government pays for reasearch that does not go into the public domain. Let pfizer pay for their own research! They don't need my subsidy.

-- Greg

Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U

[jayhawk88]

Which is itself a bit of a misleading statement, as stem cell research is a very recent thing. It would be like saying "President Britany Spears III was the first president to fund time travel research" in the year 2145.

Correction:

[Meostro]

"...any researcher who touches them can kiss his [Federal] funding good bye."

Very important distinction.

Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U

[Ralph Wiggam]

It's amazing how many people believe that stem cells come from abortions. The religious right does an amazing job of spreading bad information and nobody ever promotes correct information with as much zeal or money.

Stems cells are very much "byproducts from fertility clinics". When married couples pay for in-vitro fertilization, the clinics fertilize many eggs in a lab. After a certain ammount of time, the healthiest embryos are chosen and implanted. The rest of the embryos are destroyed as medical waste. That's it. No abortions. Those embroys were never destined to be born. Why not help people with them?

-B

RTFA

[Concern]

The contaminants cause human antibodies to attack the transplanted cells. This has been demonstrated in experiments. All of this was covered in "TFA." This makes them dangerous and probably useless for human beings without some dubious attempts to remove the contaminants. I say dubious because they are unlikely to succeed, and in addition likely only handle the particular contaminations we already know about.

Re:Aborted Fetuses = Murdered Children

[phyruxus]

>>I mean, the Germans during the holocaust had no idea what they were doing was terrible.

Not true. Some Germans cared, some didn't. To say that no Germans thought that mass murder was wrong is simply wrong.

>>The slaveowners actually thought they were doing a service by beating their slaves and forcing them to labor.

Only those who believed their own lies. Just because you keep up a front doesn't make it the truth.

What I find most ridiculous is that the same group of people who said that a black man is less than a white man and that kidnapping and enslaving africans was the "white man's burden" are the same group who pretend that they are the worlds single moral authority, and claim that as the basis for everything they are for. Infanticide has a longer history than civilization. Longer than our species. As far as opinions go, mine is that the fetus isn't a child until there's brain activity. None of this "potential" tripe that so many people bandy about. Until then it's just a lump of flesh.

You want to rail against "child murder"? How about the foetal deaths caused by pollution? How about all those dead kids in Iraq? Conservatives have no moral authority because they have continuously contradicted themselves.

If murder is murder, why have a death penalty? Why start preemptive wars? Political convenience, that's why. It's all a lie.

Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U

[Phat_Tony]

Yes, as everyone points out over and over, Bush opponents regularly blow this totally out of proportion- it's not a "ban," stem cell research is not "illegal." This is simply a restriction on using Federal Government funding to support research that develops new lines of human, embryonic stem cells, and all four of those items in italics greatly reduce the impact of Bush's executive order compared to what is often claimed.

Never the less, the executive order in question is reprehensible. Bush is using tenuous, illogical, religious grounds to justify denying a large category of funding to a promising area of scientific inquiry. Hundreds of potential stem cell lines for research are being destroyed daily from aborted fetuses. If Bush is in favor of destroying existing resources (human tissues) instead of using them to advance science and save lives, why not ban organ donation? Does anything in the bible say "thou shalt not help fund researching [new, human, embryonic] stem cells if thou art the [federal] government?" If this research is immoral, why only ban government funding, as opposed to all funding, or the research itself? If this is about abortion, why not oppose abortion, rather than research? Can anyone make sense of this policy? It scares me, not in how sweeping the effects are, but because The President, the "Leader of the Free World," is using executive orders to dictate where scientific research funding goes based on personal, nonsensical, unpopular religious motives.

I think the rest of government should do what the Pentagon does, and ignore it. There's no basis in law for "executive orders" anyway. I doubt any president would allow a case based on violating an executive order to go to court, in case the Supreme Court ruled that Executive orders don't exist. Chances are, Bush can't do anything but get grumpy if the whole Federal Government simply ignores his ban.

Re:Aborted Fetuses = Murdered Children

[WIAKywbfatw]

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. I guess it makes you feel superior to those on the other side of the debate by defining a pregnancy, even one in its embryonic stage as equal to a fully-formed and developed baby regardless of whether or not that pregnancy has developed to the stage where it has a viable chance of life outside the womb.

I find it funny that the same people who are so adamant that abortion is murder are almost always the same people that are opposed to the dissemination of methods of birth control as well as the same people who are quick to make single mothers the scapegoats for all of society's ills.

And what right do you have to tell a pregnant woman, regardless of how her child was conceived, just what exactly she is allowed to do with her own body?

So the Religious Right is Humpty Dumpty?

[Engineer-Poet]

The religious right position on life is that life begins at conception (when a sperm and egg unite). Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is most certainly an abortion.

Funny, in biology abortion is defined as the termination of a pregnancy. There are spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) and induced abortions. Induced abortions may be classified as therapeutic, elective or criminal.

A zygote in a Petri dish is not part of a pregnancy. Without a pregnancy, you cannot have an abortion. It's patently obvious that the attempt to classify the discarding of unused IVF zygotes as "abortions" has nothing to do with the facts, and everything to do with political posturing to an ignorant public. This resembles Humpty Dumpty redefining "glory" to suit his whim of the moment; it debases the very purpose of language, which depends on agreed-upon meanings.

you are equally misinformed.

I could get rich mining irony ore here.

This is the crux of the entire stem cell issue (from the religious right standpoint), and I'm amazed you don't understand this concept, yet choose to talk about this issue as if you are well informed.

If you mean that it's an issue (and a problem) that a large part of the American public is taking a highly-emotional political position based on what amounts to a large number of partial truths and outright falsehoods, then you begin to understand. Your problem is that the facts are opposite the stance you appear to be backing.

criminal purposes

[Doc Ruby]

Whose purpose? The "purpose" of sex is to make a baby, so rubbers are illegal? All those living, human sperm cells (and that lonely egg cell), doomed to death when they were faithfully obeying their purpose. The purpose of marriage is to make a baby, so childless couples are criminals - divorce is a crime, girls who don't put out on dates where my purpose is to get laid are criminals.

Where's the logic ???

[Dave21212]

I've seen about a hundred posts arguing about why or why not the research is something that is equivalent to killing babies, and as many arguing the federal research ban only stops institutions asking for money for the research...

First, to get it out of the way, the "ban" is not a law against research, but a funding rule that is implemented such that any facility receiving federal dollars (every public hospital, college, reasearch center, ~99.9% of the US research facilities) is barred from conducting the research on new lines. If you get federal dollars for anything at the facility, you can't do the research, period.


Now, the type of stem-cell reseach being debated uses discarded eggs from In-Vitro Fertilization. Regarding the radical right religious regime's belief that a Day 5 blastocyst is a person, complete with a soul, etc... Sure, if they want to 'believe' this, they can. The problem arises when they try to selectively (read: politically) apply laws to support their religious beliefs.

Apparently, many people (including a bunch of folks here on /.) believe that stem-cell research is a crime because babies get killed in the process. Here's a news-flash, as part of any IVF cycle, there are some fertilized eggs that are implanted, and some that are not. The extras are either put into cryo, or more often simply destroyed. (Some of those are donated to test the nutrient medium that's used - basically if they don't survive, that batch of medium is bad, if they do survive they are discarded anyway). To give you an example, during an IVF cycle, there might be 17 eggs retrieved, of them 16 fertilize, of them 12 make it to day 3, then of them only 2-3 are implanted (the other 9-10 go to Day-5 then get destroyed). Instead of being forced to destroy them, people should have the freedom to donate them to stem-cell research if their beliefs allow.

So, shouldn't the radical right religious regime be even more adamantly against IVF ? While a handful of cells used in research seems to get them in a panic, they ignore the simple fact that thousands of fertilized eggs are destroyed every month as part of normal IVF treatments. Why aren't they calling for the elimination of fertility clinics ? Are these couples who pursue IVF mass-murders ?

Where's the logic here ? If stem-cell research should be banned because allowing a Day-5 blast to arrest is killing a baby, why do they not have any issue with, or even debate over the effects of the IVF treatments where the stem-cells for this research are obtained ?

Where is the logic in the argument ?

[Dave21212]

I've seen about a hundred posts arguing about why or why not the research is something that is equivalent to killing babies, and as many arguing the federal research ban only stops institutions asking for money for the research...

First, to get it out of the way, the "ban" is not a law against research, but a funding rule that is implemented such that any facility receiving federal dollars (every public hospital, college, research center, ~99.9% of the US research facilities) is barred from conducting the research on new lines. If you get federal dollars for anything at the facility, you can't do the research, period.


Now, the type of stem-cell research being debated uses discarded eggs from In-Vitro Fertilization. Regarding the radical right religious regime's belief that a Day 5 blastocyst is a person, complete with a soul, etc... Sure, if they want to 'believe' this, they can. The problem arises when they try to selectively (read: politically) apply laws to support their religious beliefs.

Apparently, many people (including a bunch of folks here on /.) believe that stem-cell research is a crime because babies get killed in the process. Here's a news-flash, as part of any IVF cycle, there are some fertilized eggs that are implanted, and some that are not. The extras are either put into cryo, or more often simply destroyed. (Some of those are donated to test the nutrient medium that's used - basically if they don't survive, that batch of medium is bad, if they do survive they are discarded). To give you an example, during an IVF cycle, there might be 17 eggs retrieved, of them 16 fertilize, of them 12 make it to day 3, then of them only 2-3 are implanted (the other 9-10 go to Day-5 then get destroyed). Instead of being forced to destroy them, people should have the freedom to donate them to stem-cell research if their beliefs allow.

So, shouldn't the radical right religious regime be even more adamantly against IVF ? While a handful of cells used in research seems to get them in a panic, they ignore the simple fact that thousands of fertilized eggs are destroyed every month as part of normal IVF treatments. Why aren't they calling for the elimination of fertility clinics ? Are these couples who pursue IVF mass-murderers ?

Where's the logic here ? If stem-cell research should be banned because allowing a Day-5 blast to arrest is killing a baby, why do they not have any issue with, or even debate over the actual IVF treatments where the stem-cells for this research are obtained ?

To me, there is no logic, it's just politics, plain and simple. The radicals pushing for the "ban" don't really respect life so much, they do respect power and influence and seem to want to use it to force themselves on others.


p.s. If you have questions or want more facts on IVF, please feel free to ask me and I'll try to point you to some answers.