FROM: USA TODAY
Dec. 17, 2005
States play catch-up on stem cells
By Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES - Three years after President Bush announced
restrictions on federally funded medical research using stem cells
from human embryos, a California panel will meet today to begin the
process of granting $3 billion in state money to stem cell
researchers.

  Calif. governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported an initiative
passed by voters for $3 billion for stem cell researchers.
Getty Images

Moving fast on an initiative that California voters approved on Nov.
2, the 27-member committee aims to encourage research into
controversial stem cell techniques to explore potential cures for
700 diseases and debilitating conditions. These include spinal cord
injuries, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Lou
Gehrig's disease.

Today's meeting in San Francisco will dramatize the rejection of
Bush's policy by the most populous state at a time when debates over
the morality of embryonic stem cell research are popping up in
statehouses across the nation, in Congress and at the United Nations.

A few states - notably New Jersey, Wisconsin and Illinois - are
rushing to catch up with California in encouraging stem cell
research, with an eye on the prestige and economic benefits that
could result.

Elsewhere, social conservatives are moving to block embryonic stem
cell research. Because harvesting stem cells from an embryo requires
destroying it, the issue "has crossed lines with the exposed nerve
of abortion politics in this country," says Daniel Perry, president
of the Coalition for Advancement of Medical Research, which supports
stem cell work.

California's embrace of stem cell science has triggered strong
reactions elsewhere:

* New Jersey, Wisconsin and Illinois are budgeting taxpayer dollars
or proposing California-style initiatives to try to prevent a brain
drain of biomedical researchers to the West Coast. (Advanced Cell
Technologies, a Worcester, Mass., company, is shopping for land in
Northern California to build a branch facility.)

Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, a Democrat, will ask the Legislature
next year to place on the ballot a proposal to grant researchers $1
billion. The money would be raised by a new tax on Botox injections,
liposuction and other "vanity" treatments.

In Texas, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has asked Gov. Rick Perry,
a fellow Republican, to do what it takes to prevent California from
stealing scientific luminaries from medical research centers in
Houston. Pro-research bills are likely to be considered next year by
legislatures in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire and
Washington state.

* Social conservatives in several other states are fighting
embryonic stem cell research. Eight states - Arkansas, Iowa,
Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and
Virginia - now ban or limit such research. All but one, Michigan,
were "red states" that backed Bush in this year's elections. South
Dakota passed the most recent ban, in February.

Next year, legislators in Missouri, Kansas and Louisiana will
consider barring at least some types of embryonic stem cell research.

* In Congress, both sides in the stem cell debate are gearing up for
battles next year.

Some bipartisan proposals would lift the restrictions Bush announced
in August 2001, which limit federal financing to work with embryonic
stem cell "lines," or colonies, that existed before his speech. Sen.
Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is sponsoring a bill that would criminalize
an often-used lab technique called therapeutic cloning. The
technique does not involve the reproductive cloning of human beings.

In California, the ballot initiative known as Proposition 71 was
spearheaded by wealthy parents of children with life-threatening
diseases and was backed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It
passed with a 59% majority. The state will sell bonds and give out
$300 million a year in research grants for 10 years.

It's a sum that dwarfs the $24.8 million that the National
Institutes of Health spent on human embryonic stem cell studies this
year.

"It puts California on equal footing with whole nations that have
made stem cell research one of their national priorities - nations
like South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Sweden," Daniel Perry says.

Tom Okarma, president and chief executive officer of Geron Corp., a
biotechnology company in Menlo Park, Calif., says that "we truly
believe (stem cell therapy) will be the most revolutionary medical
advance in the 21st century, and the feds are asleep. So the message
from the states is: If you won't fund this, we will."

'A matter of conviction'

Stem cells are microscopic building blocks that can be converted to
blood cells or to cells that form the brain and other organs and
tissues. A theory behind stem cell research is that diseased cells
could be replaced with healthy ones made from stem cells mass-
produced in laboratories.

Few social conservatives object to research involving adult stem
cells that are taken from bone marrow or umbilical-cord blood. But
the more flexible stem cells from 5-day-old embryos are more
intriguing to biomedical researchers - and more controversial in the
political debates surrounding the research.

Embryonic stem cells can develop into any of the 200 types of cells
and tissues in the body.

"We do not end some lives for the medical benefit of others," Bush
said when he announced his research restrictions in 2001. "For me,
this is a matter of conviction - a belief that life, including early
life, is biologically human, genetically distinct and valuable."

Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., who favors embryonic stem cell research,
says the Bush administration shows no post-election signs of easing
its policy.

Bush is pushing the United Nations to approve an international
treaty or declaration against therapeutic cloning. The U.N. will
debate the issue in February. Such a move by the U.N. could prevent
researchers overseas from working with California institutions.

Bush was the first president to approve federal funding for
embryonic stem cell research, but limited it to stem cell line that
existed when he spoke in 2001. At that time, there were 78 stem cell
lines available for federally subsidized experiments, says Elias
Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Now,
he says, 22 of those lines are still useful.

When scientists set out to develop new cultures of embryonic stem
cells without federal money, they can obtain embryos in two ways:

* With donors' consent, in vitro fertilization clinics provide
unwanted embryos that otherwise would be destroyed.

* Through somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technique pioneered in
South Korea, embryo-like balls that contain stem cells can be
artificially created by stripping an egg of its DNA content and
inserting the DNA of a donor, who may be suffering from a
genetically caused disease. This is called therapeutic cloning.

States play catch-up

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin says playing catch-up with
California "certainly was a factor" last month when he announced a
proposal for a $750 million public-private partnership to build a
research institute.

In Kansas City, Mo., business leaders are hoping that the privately
endowed Stowers Institute for Medical Research, which opened in
2000, will be the seedbed for thousands of jobs. But proposals by
two Republican state lawmakers to criminalize embryonic stem cell
research could change that. Stowers trustees say they'll build a 600-
job facility elsewhere if Missouri outlaws somatic cell nuclear
transfer.

The technique "holds the key to unlocking the body's built-in
capacity for self-repair," and "no more creates human life than does
growing someone's skin cells in tissue culture," says William
Neaves, president and chief executive officer of the Stowers
Institute.

Peter Levi, president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of
Commerce, says there's "enormous potential" for Stowers' discoveries
to spin off start-up companies in a "Biomed Valley," but "the
(legislative) threat that has been hanging over the state of
Missouri is tremendous."

In California, universities and research institutes are forming
partnerships to apply for grants. Medical schools are planning new
buildings with state money. Labs are sending recruitment letters
around the USA and to other countries, "promising them everything,"
Okarma says.

Daniel Perry says that a "patchwork quilt" of state laws is no way
to guide important medical research.

But it's likely that full federal funding won't happen during Bush's
tenure unless biologists find a way to create all-purpose stem cells
without the need for an embryo - a development that scientists are
working on, says Robert Lanza, medical Advanced Cell Technologies
medical director.

"Scientific facts change," the NIH's Zerhouni says, "and new
possibilities are always raised."

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