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NIH Orders Halt To Embryonic Stem Cell Research
sciencehabit writes "Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Friday ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments. NIH's action — probably unprecedented in its history — is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from US District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."
... Backwards ...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Lobby Congress and the President (who are rather in the majority at the moment) to change the law in the first place?
Oh wait... that's not weaseling, sorry.. I'll come in again.
Things always go smoothly. But seriously - the "debate" (can't believe there even is one) over creationism is harmful intellectually, but I doubt it is actively inhibiting research on anything. Stem cell research, on the other hand, IS being held back by religious groups that believe any fertilized embryo is a human. And I for one truly detest the role religion is playing in actively inhibiting research on diseases that are currently killing people. My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins - I can't find a clever way to say it, but why must this still not apply to religion?
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Well, it might suck, but presuming the legal basis of the court ruling is valid, I'm appreciative that they shut the experiments down.
Before you flame me into a crispy marshmallow, answer me this: Is the NIH the sort of institution you want playing fast and loose with any law or court ruling that isn't blatantly, obviously unconstitutional or an instantaneous danger to human lives? I want NIH crossing their T's and dotting the shit of out their I's, for my own safety and peace of mind, and while I hope they fight this ruling (because stem cells will save lives in the long run) I'm grimly satisfied they obeyed it while it's legally binding.
to adult stem cells - you know, the ones that have actually led to productive therapies.
Embryonic stem cells are said to have a lot of "potential". Strange, by this time I would think they would have come up with something for all the hype made over them.
I'd not only accept your offer -- but welcome it. Having ethical concerns with a practice and not being entirely sure that the fruits of the practice are identifiable (and hence avoidable) is a much worse state that if we could be sure that those who find this troubling could fully avoid supporting or abetting the practice by buying products or services derived from it.
I refuse to allow the beliefs of anybody to get in the way of scientific research.
The end justifies the means.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
There shouldn't be a need to weasel around this.
I totally agree, but yet, here we are.
It just seems like, if people can find loopholes in the laws to do bad things, surely they can find one to try to cure diseases. (Up to a point.)
Everyone who is against stem cell research should be unable to ever benefit from the results of said research.
Agreed... It's almost like we are in an age of endarkenment... This is so saddening
That one person's (or group of people's) belief in fairy tales should hold back progress that could save countless lives and easy the suffering of millions.
It would just get filibustered. A simple majority doesn't seem to cut it anymore.
We used to criticize the USSR because they politicized science.
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As a biomedical researcher, I wouldn't want the fruits of my labor to be withheld from anyone who needs medical treatment on the basis of their ideology. I would, however, like to see more people living up to their putative beliefs by refusing to make use of technology derived from practices they claim to find morally objectionable. If you're opposed to stem cell research, then refuse any treatment based on such research; if you're a creationist, then refuse any treatment based on modern biology at all; etc. This applies outside the medical realm, too -- consider the number of people who bitch about open source on Slashdot, or more generally, people using the internet to complain about how terrible the internet is. Put your money where your mouth is, folks.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think that is an oversimplification - everyone agrees that the intended ends (cures for diseases, etc) are desirable, its just that a small but vocal minority says that the means are bad because some book can vaguely be interpreted to say so.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Given the wording of the law and the clear legislative intent, the decision seems to be legally correct. The solution here requires congress to act. An additional unfortunate detail is that the Democrats are completely spineless and so getting them to deal with this problem is going to be tough even though this majority of Americans support embryonic stem cell research (source- http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/poll010626.html).
You know this is just federal funding.
I'd throw some serious change at any company that wants to do the research without the federal funding.
Consider the other side of the question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Where do we draw the line? It is not an easy question, and is not easily answered.
The doctors who did these experiments thought that they knew where to draw the line. Humanity decided that they were wrong.
they need to get rid of that "agree to filibuster" thing they have going on.... if you want to tie things up for hours and hours, then by gum you should have to work at it and ACTUALLY tie things up for hours and hours, not just say "can we agree that we are going to filibuster this so we can all go home and go fishin'?"
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
I agree. The Democrats should call the GOP on their threats to filibuster. Make them do it!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Do I have to be a religious nutcase to object to breeding human beings to be used for spare parts and then discarded as trash? /atheist
The end justifies the means.
I can't exactly tell what you are trying to say by pointing out the underlying philosophy... but I'd like to mention that I think you have correctly identified it, and that many people's worldviews seem to include believing that the end does not justify the means.
Of course, people then justify all kinds of actions by the end result, but most people seem to be willing to SAY that the end doesn't justify the means.
Except then the GOP gets a stump to stand upon. This is where C-SPAN causes a problem; all the rhetoric during a filibuster would be good for Republican PR, they could use the filibuster time to motivate their base, etc.
"Agree to disagree" acceptance of threatened filibuster stinks, I agree. But the other option is to give the Republicans the pulpit for as long as they wish. I'm not sure the Democrats want that to happen.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Very soon--perhaps even already--China will be the premier center of stem cell research in the world. They are making enormous advances, due to their strong economic position and their lack of being hindered by religious conservatives or a two-party system. Researchers will go there, all the intellectual work will flock to China because they can get their funding and have the collaboration they need. And the US will become a short-lived historical footnote, an intellectual backwater led by a corrupt plutocracy, filled with ignorant evangelical nutjobs and greedy corporatists. Americans are stupid, greedy, short-sighted, superstitious, easily cowed, lazy, obsessed with violence and sex, and fiscally irresponsible.
Make no mistake: I do not condone China's abhorrent record on human rights, politics, foreign policy, censorship, or the environment. I especially despise the way they have so brilliantly manipulated the US into conflicts with other countries and have essentially commandeered the global economy. But they have only done this because, again, Americans are too stupid and played right into the trap.
Except I don't know anyone against stem cell research. I am however aware of many people opposed to embryonic stem cell research and most of them would be horrified to learn that they were receiving treatment that derived from embryonic stem cell research (of course that won't happen anytime soon, since there are no treatments derived from embryonic stem cell research despite lavish funding of it by the state of California and several other states and municipalities).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Why? What do the Republicans have to say that would be convincing to anyone but their fellow travelers? I say let 'em get up there and display their stupidity for everyone to see.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
The tyrants and evil men of this world always start by dehumanizing someone. Can you explain to me why dehumanizing is okay if the results are for the good of all? The moment you do, just substitute "Jew" or "Christian" or "Black" or "Chinaman" for "Embryo" and you'll see how atrocities are committed in the name of "society".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Except then the GOP gets a stump to stand upon. This is where C-SPAN causes a problem; all the rhetoric during a filibuster would be good for Republican PR, they could use the filibuster time to motivate their base, etc."
So the hell what? Let the democrats motivate their base also! Present your arguments and then turn around and fight for them! It would be damn nice to get back to the days of the progressives actually fighting for their politics instead of just rolling over and playing dead.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Much of the objection is due to religion, religious types thinking we shouldn't be messing with stem cells and everything to do with life.
I thought it was because they thought embryonic stem cells came from human embryos which they believe to be humans, because they have decided at what point a human embryo is a human... whereas it seems the rest of the society refuses to answer that question, apparently putting it "somewhere" before birth... because nobody seems to think killing a baby post-birth is ok.
Yes, there are some who say that we shouldn't be "messing with [...] everything to do with life." There are people who say all medicine is bad. There are people who say that we came from aliens and that they have been trying to contact us but the government is blocking it. But I would raise a definite [citation needed] on your assertion that MUCH of the objection is due to should-not-be-messing-with-life ideas.
Yeah! I feel the same way about people who are against the military.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
> Can you explain to me why dehumanizing is okay if the results are for the good of all?
All you have to do to "dehumanize" an Embryo is merely show a picture of one.
Do you even know what that term means?
Calling an embryo a person is much more of a stretch than calling a homosexual a non-person.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You said "I refuse to allow the beliefs of anybody to get in the way of scientific research."
Anti-torture, anti-vivisection and reverence for life are beliefs, beliefs slow scientific progress.
Do I have to be a religious nutcase to object to breeding human beings to be used for spare parts and then discarded as trash?
No, but you have to be an ignorant fool to believe that's how it works.
Mendel wasn't by any stretch of the modern imagination a "creationist".
He probably would take to task modern creationists for sloppy thinking if nothing else.
Not all clerics are raving anti-intelectuals. Carlin experienced this firsthand.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are you sure that monk was a creationist? Would he have said that Darwin is full of crap? Or would he have said that "Hey this Darwin guy is taking my research to the next step. This is pretty cool stuff!"
It seems to me you're effectively putting words into his mouth.
There are many "creationists" by your definition that only believed in it because it was the only known thing. The difference is those that vehemently say evolution is full of crap. I can understand the ones that say God helps steer the evolution that fits in with what we know about the universe. The ones that say God made it this way and things don't evolve are limiting God's capabilities, in my opinion.
Similarly they should all be crying how the world is flat and the sun goes around the earth, because that is what they believed in the time of Jesus.
To be fair:
If your against animal testing (not a particularly republican standpoint), you should decline virtually all medication.
ETHICS are indeed outside of biology. Are you suggesting that ETHICS has no basis deciding how we experiment in biology at all?
So the ends justify the means? To what end and by what means are you willing to gain knowledge?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Ideology-testing for anything and everything is really, really stupid. It is mean-spirited and spiteful, as well as impossible to enforce. Let's suppose, just for fun, that the law is changed (as it will be) and federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is allowed. The people whom you wish to deny treatment are now having their tax dollars taken from them to do research they disagree with. Will you still deny them treatment? What if someone is opposed to war. Would you deny them any medical treatment that was advanced or created during wartime for the purpose of treating soldiers? That might include you, or a loved one. Suppose you are on the brink of foreclosure and a millage increase is proposed for schools or the fire department. You vote it down because any tiny increase in your tax burden would push you over the edge into foreclosure. Should your kids be denied access to the schools? Should the fire department pass you by in case of an emergency?
Grow the hell up. We live in a democracy. Some times things will go your way, some times they won't. Deciding to punish people who disagree with you is a really good way to lead to civil strife and violence.
they wouldn't need federal funds to finance it, private corporations would foot the bill.
there has been more advances with adult stem cells anyway
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
So denying treatment to people based on an ideological argument is enlightenment? You are contributing to the problem. Ask yourself: Do you want to live in a society where EMS checks your political, religious, and social affiliations to provide treatment instead of triaging your medical condition?
I wish that would work, but I was paying enough attention during the last few Presidential elections to know it won't.
Were you paying attention to Sarah Palin "displaying her stupidity for everyone to see"? How well did that work out for Democrats?
But I still think we should restore the original filibuster.
You are using the word "creationist" in an absurd fashion, to describe everybody who existed before Darwin (or were his contemporaries). Most people here on Slashdot and in general use it to describe people in the *modern* era who reject the large body of scientific work that has followed from Darwin's work and that of some of his contemporaries. This evidence has been built up over the last hundred-and-fifty years or so, and is more-or-less impossible for a rational scientific person to reject at this point in time.
A young-earth-creationist is somebody who rejects more than just that, but also much of the rest of physics, chemistry, geology, etc. Those are the serious loons. But a few hundred years ago, plenty of scientists might have believed in a young earth - doesn't mean we'd call them "young earth creationists" in the modern sense.
The point is that in order to label somebody for rejecting something, they had to have had access to a similar body of evidence.
I have no religious problem with embryonic stem cell research, just don't use my money (taxes) to do it.
I would imagine the first 10 hours might be of great appeal to republican news outlets, but after several hundred hours of republicans talking, I imagine the democrats would be the ones to come away from it with plenty of juicy tidbits. After all, how long do you think it would take for George W Bush, given a microphone, a recorder, and no prompt, to say something so stupid that it would alienate his supporters? I give it less than a day.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Because democrats totally can't comment to news outlets directly, rather than by CSpan? And they have the advantage of commenting when they would like. The republicans would have to keep talking, even long after they had run out of things to say.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
That is fine, but realize that the "anti-abortion/anti-embryo destroying" voters cross party lines. There will be a significant number of Democrats that will not vote in favor. Politics is not just a two sided coin.
If they have the votes to filibuster, why waste everyone's time by making them go up there and read the telephone book?
Basically, because you have to stick your neck out more to actually filibuster vs. to refuse to vote for cloture.
Physically, because there is at least a little bit of an endurance trial to get up there and speak, and politically, because now there's video of you personally as a specific senator A) being so against the passage of a specific bill that you would rather read the telephone book for hours than allow a vote on it and B) being so against the passage of a specific bill you would rather make sure that the Senate could do nothing rather than vote on it.
Now, maybe Bill X is very unpopular in your specific state even if it enjoys support elsewhere. In that case you're still good to filibuster. In a lot of other cases, you're taking a much bigger political risk than is currently necessary as part of a filibuster threat.
Do you know what embryos we're talking about here? They're little clumps of cells that were going to be flushed down the toilet anyway.
Seriously, do you not get that? Here's a little sketch of where they come from: a couple of rich people walk in the door of a fertility clinic and say "doctor, we can has babiez?", the doctor is like "sure, let me do science to you", science is done to them, the couple say "okay no more babiez", and the doctor says "well now what do I do with all these extra fertilized eggs? do I give them to researchers for to science them, or do I throw them away?" and the parents are like "sure whatever, we has babiez to deal with now".
You're saying that they must be destroyed without science being done. Everyone else is saying do science and then destroy them.
Do you not see where there's no difference in eventual outcomes? Do you not see where this is a tremendous waste of potential?
So the hell what? Let the democrats motivate their base also! Present your arguments and then turn around and fight for them! It would be damn nice to get back to the days of the progressives actually fighting for their politics instead of just rolling over and playing dead.
You're basing this on the assumption that either side (now, I'm talking about the senators here) has ideas that they can defend. It's become pretty clear that the Democrats don't know how to run a government any better than the Republicans. There's a reason both sides have abysmal approval ratings (Democrats slightly better, but that's like saying horse poop tastes better than cow poop).
I agree with you, they should be forced into trying to filibuster, but I only say it because I would enjoy the sheer spectacle of it all, not because I expect either side to say anything remotely useful.
Qxe4
If it's that you don't believe an Embryo is a person, then I have to ask where it is that YOU draw the line, because right now no one has agreed on it.
I think birth is a pretty reasonable place to draw the line legally, given that most modern laws implicitly roll with that. For example, the date on which it's legal for you to drink isn't based on when you were concieved, when you entered the second trimester, etc. It's based on when you were born.
A bit of history: the laser was first theorized in 1917, by Albert Einstein. In 1947 Lamb and Retherford demonstrated the first actual laser. The first practical use of lasers that most people are aware of was the CD-Rom drive; the Yellow Book standards that described CDs were published in 1985. That's what, 68 years from theory to practice?
For comparison, research into stem cells started in the 1960s. You're complaining that no treatments have been derived from it yet? Despite the fact that biological research is far trickier than physics? Despite the fact that the funding for stem cell research in the United States has all but dried up?
Seriously, it's like some people don't understand self-fulfilling prophecies. If you stop funding stem cell research and focus on other things, of course you're not going to get results out of stem cell research.
And it's completely, utterly futile. Can anyone name a filibuster that failed because they simply couldn't find anyone to talk anymore?
Mostly, it doesn't work out that way -- instead, they just don't filibuster at all.
I can't, offhand, point to a filibuster that failed because no one wanted to talk anymore. I can, on the other hand, point to the frequency of filibuster use's meteoric rise in the post-actually-standing-up-and-talking era. Correlation doesn't equal causation; nonetheless, here there is causation.
I don't get it. If you have no moral problem with stem cell research than your opposition is to what exactly? More effective treatment for Alzheimer's? Possibly allowing a cripple to walk? Better treatments for cancer?
Would you rather all work be paid for and patented by large organizations who will then control who gets to benefit? "Sorry Mrs. Jones little Johnny's is most likely going to die of Leukemia. Yes there are some incredibly promising and successful gene therapies but you can't afford the price that Merck set for the treatment. No, no the actual treatment isn't that expensive but its like HIV drugs, big farma owns the patent and even though the marginal cost is low they get to set the price. Well yes insurance would have covered it but you don't have any, maybe you should have accepted the job as a corporate officer rather than a hotel maid."
I apologize for taking the argument to an extreme, but this person claims not to have a moral issue with the research (a position I can at least respect if not agree with,) rather they seem to have high school civics level view of the world that says the US federal government should not pay for anything. It's not like this is research for a malarial drug that will primary help poor black and brown people, this is research that has the potential to save the life of someone the poster knows and loves(even if it is themselves.)
What makes it so much worse is that since now being a Tea-Tard is acceptable and so many people agree with the bind mantra of no government spending this somehow got modded insightful.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If other people do not understand your ideas, whose fault is it - the other people for not understanding your ideas, or you for making your ideas unclear?
I mean, when you responded to my post you just made some vague noises about not doing something we'll regret, asked some relatively meaningless questions, and included an insipid quote from Jurassic Park (of all things). Whose fault is it, exactly, that we didn't immediately leap to the conclusion that you hold the (relatively extreme) view that modern in-vitro fertilization should be banned?
Further, slippery slopes work both ways; in your case, would you be willing to charge a woman with unintentional or negligent homicide because she miscarried? Would you be willing to mandate that all women do whatever it takes in order to ensure that they carry their babies to term, including doing things like banning the use of cigarettes and alcohol and heavy exercise by pregnant women? Because that's where your position, that life begins at conception, leads.