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Stem-Cell Research Funding Institute Is Shuttered
An anonymous reader writes "The National Institutes of Health, the top funder of biomedical research in the U.S., has closed a program designed to bring induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from the lab to the clinic. It has made no public mention of the closure, but the website has been deleted and Nature News reports that the center director, Mahendra Rao, resigned his post in frustration after the program allocated funds to only one clinical trial in its last round of funding."
certain whack-a-loon true believer in congress will be happy.
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This sucks regardless of what side of the aisle you are on.
There are diseases where the only known effective treatment at this point in time is stem cells. And those are/were in the trial stages.
Fuck politics.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"James Anderson, director of the NIHâ(TM)s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which administered the CRM, counters that only one application - that made by Kapil Bharti of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda and his colleagues - received a high enough score from an external review board to justify continued funding."
You can take this at face value, or assume academic politics, but it doesn't seem like party politics.
It's not because of the subject that the research is being stopped. The NIH, along with the NSF and NASA, had its science budget cut during the sequester and it hasn't recovered. Lots of programs all over the country are being discontinued as a result.
Everyone knows stem cells are bad. We can't let rational thought and facts get in the way of our crusades.
Seriously, at this point the anti-embryonic stem cell movement has tarnished the name and scientists should pick a new name to avoid these sort of issues in less objectionable forms of stem cell research.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Mahendra Rao, M.D., Ph.D.
"Dr. Mahendra Rao is internationally renowned for his research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and other somatic stem cells. He has worked in the stem cell field for more than 20 years, with stints in academia, government and regulatory affairs and industry. He received his M.D. from Bombay University in India and his Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology.
Following postdoctoral training at Case Western Reserve University, he established his research laboratory in neural development at the University of Utah. He next joined the National Institute on Aging as chief of the Neurosciences Section, where he studied neural progenitor cells and continued to explore his longstanding interest in their clinical potential.
Most recently, he spent six years as the vice president of Regenerative Medicine at Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California. He co-founded Q Therapeutics, a neural stem cell company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also served internationally on advisory boards for companies involved in stem cell processing and therapy; on committees, including as the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationâ(TM)s Cellular Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee chair; and as the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine and International Society for Stem Cell Research liaison to the International Society for Cellular Therapy." ref
I'm an indépendant but I do hater liars of any stripe - the Republicans only objected to embryonic stem cells, there are lots of other paths and kinds of stem cells.
The Republicans otherwise funded stem cell research.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is bureaucratic troubles, not partisan politics. No one is opposed to iPS on ideological grounds. Well, no one who is worth considering anyway. iPS aren't made from embryos. ESC are the ones that conservatives hate, that come from fertilized eggs.
If that was a joke, possible, it was a rather poor one. I think it was probably also tasteless, but as I can't identify where the joke lies, I'm not certain.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, that was McCain and Palin. If people has seen a better choice they might have gone with it.
FWIW, I may have voted for Obama, I can't recall, but if so it was only as the lesser of two evils. He probably was that. This isn't much as praise, but it's the best I've got in stock.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That sounds like the actual reason and the main problem behind iPS. They are about as high of a hanging fruit as there is on that particular tree of science right now. A lot of research into inducing cell into becoming a stem cell has been done, and the only methods that work are extremely difficult and expensive to implement.
As a result, there's a lot less research on the topic, simply because we have already picked all but the highest hanging fruit already. Most methods are either impractical or are being outed as either mistakes or fraud (read up on STAP cells for a good recent example, they were outed as fraud just a week ago by the same research institute that hailed their invention in january). So if internal review board can't find good research, it's likely not because of politics, but because there simply is very little promising research available on the subject.
Except that most "bible thumpers" hate embryonic stem cells and often hail induced pluripotent stem cells as the "religiously ethically correct alternative", as they do not require embryo to produce.
Obama doesn't fund the government. That's Congress' job.
People like to say "Bush banned stem-cell research". Because he took an executive order to do so, at a time when Congress was backing everything he did (he did not veto a single bill during his first 6 years in office, which I believe is a record).
Obama has pretty much the opposite kind of Congress. The only blame you could possibly give Obama for this is for not pretending that he hated stem-cell funding research, thus forcing them all to pass bills requiring it. Reverse psychology is about the only thing that could possibly work for him at this point.
Actually they support pluripotent SC research pretty widely. Mainly because you don'[t have to harvest SC's from human embryos. Speaking of emrbryonic stem cell research, which is supposed to make MJ Fox better and Cristopher Reeve walk again, how many diseases can now be treated with emrbryonic stem cell therapy?
And not a single one of them is treated with embryonic stem cells. Because of tumors.
FYI: certain religious members of congress have been trying to remove funding from all Stem Cell research, regardless of the science.
Bush stopping the type of research he did was a compromise for an issue within the pub party.
Some of those pubs are the same idiots who want to keep funding NCAM. Even though it has never produced any results. But hey, it' magic.
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They are the ones that don't cause tumors.
I would love to see who was on the external review board. I suspect certain members of congress.
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Let me explain the title of the post.
I was the third poster. The first two were fuck Obama posts.
I don't give a shit if it's W or Obama or Ted Cruz or Pelosi or whoever. It sucks. period.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
and yet they will be all for in vitro fertilization.
The embryo's used in research comes from the waste of in vitro fertilization.
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and China and Taiwan and South Korea and places that like massive grants of private funds
It's like you don't get that research gets done no matter what you "say".
Seriously, you're wasting your time.
(not speaking for anyone, just telling you what happens IRL)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How many Bible thumpers does Japan have? China? India? Is the US the only country with enough intelligence to do medical research?
Pssh...stem cell research is sooooo 90's. It's all about solar energy and electric cars now.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
but it's the best I've got in stock.
And I think the quote above from him would be the reason why he voted 'again'. ;)
Makes good research but I wonder if it could ever by economically viable. Maybe someone can enlighten me and explain otherwise.
I imagine if it ever hit mainstream with usage on a public daily basis, you'd need millions of embryos, perhaps even every day? What? Would women be expected to line up for embryo drives like we have blood drives today?
You're really stuck in 2001.
If stem cells can make Christopher Reeve walk again, they're a helluva lot more powerful than anybody ever thought.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
shushhh. That's just a tiny detail. ESC's can make the average person fly, don't ya know. Never has anything overpromised so much, and underdelivered so little.
However the issue with embryonic stem cells are that they come from aborted human fetuses.
This is right-wing propaganda at its worst. embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM ABORTED HUMAN FETUSES. They come from left over embryos that those seeking fertility treatment no longer need. They were never aborted because they were never implanted in the first place. Because they were never implanted, they never had the chance to develop into anything near resemblance to a fetus. Please get your facts straight, no matter which side of the debate you are on.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Are you really so ignorant of the world that you think that any of these countries have christian majorities?
In Japan, extremist taoists and buddhists are the problem. In India, usually hindus and buddhists. And China has strong enough central government to suppress such people.
There are diseases where the only known effective treatment at this point in time is stem cells. And those are/were in the trial stages.
Fuck politics.
This is the thing that frustrates me the most about the current political situation. A few nihilists who have taken over one of our parties (the "Republican" one), are able to screw over the whole system so that nothing productive can get done. But that's not the worst part; any gamer can tell you that the world is full of griefers. The worst part is that they are getting away with this behavior because nobody blames them directly. So here you're clearly ticked, but you blame "politics". Why aren't you blaming the actual greifers causing the problem?
Hell, we're about to have an election this year, and both houses are likely to get more of these greifers. If voters don't make the responsible individuals pay for this behavior, where does it end?
That reinforces my point. Even people who do not have a Judeo-Christian religion still believe in the sanctity of life. Even in the US this research is not banned, just public money can't be used to fund it.
The only problem there is money. Not intelligence. In fact, a lot of researchers doing research everywhere in the world are in fact foreigners in the country doing research.
The issue is that of funds. This research is astronomically expensive and extremely difficult, requiring very expensive hardware, extremely specialized workforce and solid infrastructure.
If you're trying to push for american exceptionalism line here, you certainly can. It won't make you any less silly, as this kind of research also happens in all other rich countries. It just doesn't face the same pressure on the embryonic cells as it does in US due to prevalence of certain religious groups and their grip on power that is largely absent in Europe and Japan, the other two giants in the field.