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Stem Cells Cure Paralyzed Rats
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on Forbes as well as other sources, 'Scientists have used [embryonic] stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk.'"
I work at a genetics research laboratory, and I'm not allowed to keep mice, rats, guinepigs, or hampsters as a pet at home
If the lab you work in is part of Jackson Labs, that's a reasonably paranoid restriction. If a university lab has an infection problem, they're often small enough to treat the issue medically. If not, they can buy a fresh population from, say, Jackson Labs. Jackson needs to have the equivalent of "five-nines" reliability in their animals, where a univeristy vivarium is usually happy with two or thee nines.
Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.
Oh wait, you have no idea how science gets funded in this country, and are parroting a talking point that someone prepared for your consumption. Most scientific research depends on federal funding. The stem cell lines on the "short list" are useless because there are so few of them and they are now contaminated with the cells from other animals that are used to keep the stem cells alive. The Bush ban isn't a matter of the government paying for all your lab costs except for particular stem cell lines which get crossed off as a line item. If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization "GPL-style" and all federal funding gets cut off for all research that the organization might be doing whether it is related to stem cells at all or not. That will effectively shut it down.
If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.
The voters of the state of California approved Prop 71 which set up a bond for a stem-cell research in the state as a result of the federal funding restriction. The state would be getting a new non-federal research facility that would not be tainted by a single dollar of federal funding for equipment or office supplies or anything. Unfortunately, construction on the facility has now been held up for years now because of lawsuits from litigious wingnuts.