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."

Comments

Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless

[sconeu]

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.

Sequester strikes again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Correcting Lies

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Correcting Lies

[T.E.D.]

Odd definition of "Lie"

What happened was that there was ongoing funding of stem-cell research, much of it government-funded. However, there's an existing law that forbids any government funding of abortion. When fetal stem-cell research became a possibility, President Clinton issued an executive order saying that research didn't count against the law. Then he left office, and President Bush (II) issued his own order saying it did qualify (at least for any new fetal tissues). When president Obama took office, he issued his own order saying it was OK again.

Yes, all that was banned was new fetal tissue research. But that was where the new research was being done at the time, so its a distinction without much difference.

Today Congress is (perhaps inadvertently) getting around this re-funding by simply blanket defunding all government funding of research (along with everything else). This was the only kind of "budget" they could agree to. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama though. Sure, he signed the law for the current qasi-budget we operate under, but only because it was the best we were ever likely to get out of a House of Reps (yes, run by Republicans) that reflexively votes against anything he so much as says a kind word about.

Perhaps the Republican goal wasn't to defund stem-cell research, but that's certainly the effect. At some point incompetence becomes advanced enough that it is indistinguishable from malice.

Re:Correcting Lies

[T.E.D.]

The truth is that the House has repeatedly passed budgets, and the Demoncrat controlled Senate led by Dingy Harry Reid has refused to take them up.

That's one of those "truths" that folks like to hide lies in. Yes, the House has repeatedly passed budgets, that is true. It is also true that the Senate has repeatedly passed budgets, and Obama has repeatedly submitted budgets he'd be happy to sign to Congress. So everyone's doing their job in good faith, right?

Clearly not. The real truth here is that the House's "budgets" have contained no attempt whatsoever to contain language that has a hope of passing in the Senate, much less get a signature from the POTUS. The House knew full well those budgets wouldn't pass when they voted for them. So pretending these were serious attempts at legislation is a flat out lie.

The Senate's passed budgets, on the other hand, quite often could get a majority in the house (and a POTUS signature). The House deals with this situation that threatens to produce an actual budget by refusing to bring them up for a vote.

So yeah, we could mislead everyone and claim the House has been trying to pass budgets, or we could tell the honest truth.