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US Finalizes Stem Cell Research Guidelines
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Cosmos Magazine, to wit: "The US government unveiled final rules for embryonic stem cell research, laying out ground rules for 'ethically responsible, scientifically worthy' studies eligible for federal funds. The new rules, which go into effect today, follow President Barack Obama's March 9 executive order lifting a ban on embryonic stem cell research, an order that went into effect under his predecessor, George W. Bush. ... The US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) guidelines are slightly less restrictive than those outlined in a draft document released in April in that they allow the use of existing stem cell lines, in addition to new ones derived from IVF procedures. ... The NIH received some 49,000 comments from patient advocacy groups, scientists, medical groups, and other interested parties before issuing the guidelines."
And the MJF foundation did exactly that. Thing is, about 12 months after the ban there was no-one in the US willing to do the research. They saw the writing on the wall and declined to martyr themselves.
Maybe I'm being a bit of a prick but I translate what you've just said to be this:
And the MJF foundation did exactly that. Thing is, about 12 months after the ban there was no-one in the US willing to do the research. They were too busy whining about not being able to dip into taxpayer money to do any work.
The fact of the matter is that they could have done work on existing cell lines with taxpayer support, or done work on new cell lines with someone else's money. They elected to whine about the funding rather than spend time doing actual research. Any real "ban" was self-imposed. Declining to martyr themselves? Please, that's just more whining from the purely anti-Bush crowd (you know the type, no matter what Bush does, it's pure evil). For the record, I'm pro-research, but I just can't bear the whining on the subject.
Yes, they're whiners.
Corporations set up separate legal entities all the time to mitigate liability. Software companies will do this to mitigate losses when working with open source, for example. If they believe that new embryonic stem cell lines really are the holy grail, then why didn't they? It seems to me this is just someone chafing against a restriction rather than doing anything about it.
Understand this, any institution that took federal funding for any research was banned from doing stem cell research with new embryonic stem cell lines .
Fixed, emphasis mine. What exactly was stopping them from using the existing stem cell lines? I don't believe I've ever received a satisfactory answer for this other then "They just couldn't!" To be fair, I don't think anyone ever really got past the word "ban" to even look at problems with existing cell lines, but that's no excuse. I'd actually appreciate if you have a link of some kind to why existing cell lines were insufficient (I'm being serious.).
Now....looking for policy #2 I can get behind....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Funny how your type doesn't seem to want government to do much of anything, and views the Constitution so narrowly that such a course of action (course of inaction?) seems like the only thing that's "allowed".
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.