 |
 |
New Rules on Stem Cell Research Announced By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 6, 2009 2:08 PM The Obama administration today announced far-reaching new guidelines on the use of stem cells in medical research, and promised federal funds to study many of the hundreds of stem cell lines whose use was prohibited by the Bush administration. President Obama had promised during the presidential campaign to ease restrictions on the use of stem cells in research, and has cited the promise of stem cell research in finding cures for disorders that have so far proven intractable. The new guidelines were announced today by officials at the National Institutes of Health. In an important shift from draft guidelines issued April 23, the NIH announced that stem lines developed before the guidelines go into effect tomorrow -- Tuesday, July 7 -- will not need to meet the letter of new ethics requirements. This means that the conflict of interest policy articulated earlier -- embryos must have been leftover from clinically necessary in-vitro fertilization procedures and full informed consent be given for their use -- be a rule that is observed in principle. Programs that did not adhere to the standard on procedural grounds, but did adhere to the spirit of the standard, will now be deemed permissible, with an NIH committee making a case by case decision. Officials stressed that only ethically derived stem cell lines would be eligible for federally funded research. Announcing the new guidelines, Raynard S. Kington, the acting director of NIH, said that during the Bush years, privately funded researchers in the United States and a number of foreign laboratories had used a variety of protocols to obtain informed consent and meet other ethical requirements. He said it did not make sense to reject those stem cell lines merely because the ethics procedures used were different from the procedures that are required for new stem cell lines. Kington said that an NIH committee comprised of scientists, ethicists and advocates will evaluate older stem cell lines one by one to see if they were derived using ethical principles. The use of stem cells in research has become the subject of bitter national controversy, with advocates suggesting it is immoral for the federal government not to fund research that could save thousands of lives, and opponents arguing it is immoral to fund research that involves destroying embryos. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602076.html?hpid= topnews ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- From: "Scott McDonald" <[log in to unmask]> To: "Scott McDonald" <[log in to unmask]> Subject: PAN Applauds NIH Stem Cell Research Guidelines Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 14:23:12 -0400 PAN Applauds NIH Stem Cell Research Guidelines Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published its final Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research. Amy Comstock Rick, CEO of the Parkinson's Action Network (PAN) and President of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR), made the following statement applauding the guidelines: “We applaud the National Institutes of Health for issuing clear and well-thought out guidelines for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. What must have been a Herculean task, weighing more than 49,000 comments on this groundbreaking research, has resulted in guidelines we believe will advance the field of biomedical research and provide a solid ethical basis for the federal funding of this valuable and promising research. It’s rewarding to see that the process of engaging the community works. “We are especially pleased these guidelines offer a pathway by which existing stem cell lines, on which current research has only been able to proceed with private funding until now, now can finally move forward with the full support of the federal government. This will allow research that has been stifled for years to move forward – something the patient community has been advocating for since the restrictive federal policy was imposed by the previous Administration. We look forward to working with NIH and other federal policy entities on this issue as the research continues to evolve and advance, particularly in the area of somatic cell nuclear transfer and parthenogenesis.” http://www.parkinsonsaction.org/PAN-Applauds-NIH-Stem-Cell-Research-Guidelines.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn