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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."
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.).