WWTBAM Bored

Time has an article on A-Z health items in the U.S.

One of the S items is stem cell research, in which they say in 2001 President Bush "banned the use of most embryonic stem cells".

I have written them to inquire since when is restricting funding the same thing as a ban? This has irritated me for years. Whether we agree or not he should have made such a ruling (I do NOT want to get into that), the fact remains that nobody banned or outlawed anything. They said they would not provide public money for stem cell lines created after that date.

Researchers who could drum up private money have been free to do whatever tests they wanted on whatever stem cells they could ethically obtain.

I have seen this statement about the ban (and variations of it) made so many times over the past several years, I began to doubt myself tonight. But I just went to the NIH website and read the text of his August 2001 statement. There are no bans. It is not illegal. It simply became harder to accomplish because the public money was going away, but that's not relevant to its legality.





Whew. I had no idea that was saved up in there.





edited to add helpful punctuation only

I work at a place that gets both federal & private funding, & does some bio research.

If federal funds are used to buy anything, from the most trivial supply to a $250,000.00 piece of equipment & far, far more expensive stuff; no upper limit, under the current mandate that equipment cannot be used to do research on anything involving stem cells that didn't come from the inadequate federally OK'd cell lines.

The reality of research is that when a grant or contract is over, you are allowed to use leftover supplies & equipment, i.e. anything that wasn't literally consumed in your experiment, for other experiments.

The granting or contracting agency does not come & gather up the left-over equipment & carry it away. Well, in the very rare cases where an agency bought the equipment for you instead of giving you a grant or contract to spend as outlined in the text of the grant or contract, & it literally belongs to them, not you, it will do just that, but these are rare situations.

If, under the current restrictions, you were caught using so much as a tweezer (yes I have seen purchase orders for a lot of specialized tweezers, if you're interested) bought with federal funds on research on a subsequent grant or contract for experimentation on a not-federally-sanctioned cell line, the feds would come in & shut you down. They would also very closely examine the whole institution, & possibly shut it down, research-wise, as this is what happens when you are found to have misappropriated federal funds.

Now, misappropriation as interpreted by the feds generally means things like "spent it on alchohol when on a trip" (not allowed), or "hired your friend to start up a company" (someone at RichU got shut down for just that a few years ago; I cite this case 'cause it made the media big time; they were supposed to be researching the effect of seed-money on start-up businesses in Russia) or "buys 1st-class tickets when the rules say they'll only pay for coach" (you can upgrade, of course, but only with your own personal money); any infringement of the spending rules will do.

Its very hard to run 2 "seperate but equal" labs, one for the federally sanctioned stem cell lines, one for others. RichU recently bought a big tract of land from OtherLocalU (not poor either) in a neighborhood about 5 miles from its mother-ship campus, but hasn't even built stuff there yet, because no-one wants to be put into exile 5 whole miles away.

I've heard discussion of "maybe we build a stem-cell research building there". Then all they have to do, after buying duplicate equipment for everything, is make sure no-one accidentally carries anything in their pocket from the isolated facility to the mother-ship campus.

Maybe now they won't be doing this, which of course means the land still remains unbuilt, but whatever. Its been rumored they'll just shovel all office-workers out there, to free up valuable space in congested mother-ship city for research labs. I don't wanna go either!

Skoop deserves her own newspaper.

Why do they say "ban"?

Because there's an agenda afoot, that's why.

It's called "rhetoric".

themanintheseersuckersuit wrote:Skoop deserves her own newspaper.

themanintheseersuckersuit wrote:Skoop deserves her own newspaper.

and more

themanintheseersuckersuit wrote:Skoop deserves her own newspaper.

Thanks. Maybe I can save up and buy this one soon. They are talking about going private again.

Would "effectively banned" be more accurate, in your opinion?

slam wrote:Would "effectively banned" be more accurate, in your opinion?

Not in mine. Shortly after Bush announced the federal policy, California passed a proposition providing for state funding of stem cell research. It's taken several years for the proposition to get through the court system, but now that it has, I understand that the money, which is significant, is available for stem cell research. --Bob

Would "effectively banned" be more accurate, in your opinion?

As far as I know, the government doesn't fund research into a lot of things. Do they provide money for research into improving the taste of dog food? I don't think so. Is dog food effectively banned, then?

Just because the government doesn't take our money to give to some specific enterprise, however good or bad it is perceived to be, doesn't mean that enterprise is banned. Except in the minds of some. And many of those people either want your vote or write what the people who want your vote want them to write.

I wish more of the latter thought about it as much as 'Skoop did.

flockofseagulls says:

As far as I know, the government doesn't fund research into a lot of things. Do they provide money for research into improving the taste of dog food? I don't think so. Is dog food effectively banned, then?

As far as I am able to determine, there is no federal ban on facilities that receive federal funds doing dog food taste research with leftover supplies & equipment from federally funded research.

Therefore, no; dog food taste research is not completely banned, with, dire consequences, from facilities that receive federal funds.

Of course, gee, any entity that cares enough about stem cell research should buy land, build a building, & completely equip it. Then they wouldn't have to deal with the feds.

Or should they? Works for dog food taste, even though its not banned; dog food taste just doesn't seem to be getting much federal money. So the dog food companies use their own privately owned facilities for the research into dog food taste, even though there is no federal ban on it.

But since many of these entities funding stem cell research are, unlike the entities funding dog food taste research charities, beholden to the contributors, they think their money is better put into existing facilities in places like, say, Europe which don't ban overlapping research programs from using the same supplies & equipment.

And since a whole lot of stuff is funded with federal money, including a whole lot of stuff I don't approve of, like, say, Guantanamo & Abu Garib & such, I would like at least some of my tax dollars to go to medical research that might someday save my life, not to mention other people's lives without that medical research being hamstrung by what is to me a very weird & specious philosophical argument regarding the thwarted capacity of future sentience of isolated cells.

At any rate, there's plenty of stem cell research that's NOT "effectively banned" or has federal funding available.

It's just that those stem cell lines are adult stem cell lines...and wouldn't you know it? They're the ONLY stem cell lines from which potentially useful therapies have been gotten.

Embryonic stem cell lines just do not work as well as adult stem cell lines do. ESC's are chock full of problems.

But hmm...you never hear this mentioned in the media.

Wonder why not?

PS I'm not one of those that defines embryos as human beings with rights. However- if you've got a line of stem cells that a) works better and b) causes no moral controversy, why wouldn't you spend your time and research dollars with these cell lines, rather than pretty much deliberately going out to have a moral confrontation with people who have problems with embryonic stem cell research?

Jeemie wrote:
PS I'm not one of those that defines embryos as human beings with rights. However- if you've got a line of stem cells that a) works better and b) causes no moral controversy, why wouldn't you spend your time and research dollars with these cell lines, rather than pretty much deliberately going out to have a moral confrontation with people who have problems with embryonic stem cell research?

They do, now, and I have read plenty about it as it developed.

Not fair to disparage the press for not writing about this part.

Ritterskoop wrote:

Jeemie wrote:
PS I'm not one of those that defines embryos as human beings with rights. However- if you've got a line of stem cells that a) works better and b) causes no moral controversy, why wouldn't you spend your time and research dollars with these cell lines, rather than pretty much deliberately going out to have a moral confrontation with people who have problems with embryonic stem cell research?

They do, now, and I have read plenty about it as it developed.

Not fair to disparage the press for not writing about this part.

You're right- they have mentioned it more.

Yet many also still harp on embryonic stem cells like the "effective ban" on them is holding back treatments/cures for people, and yet they have not proven to be as fruitful.

So to me, it DOES seem that there are people out there that deliberately want to provoke people.

Jeemie wrote:

Ritterskoop wrote:

Jeemie wrote:
PS I'm not one of those that defines embryos as human beings with rights. However- if you've got a line of stem cells that a) works better and b) causes no moral controversy, why wouldn't you spend your time and research dollars with these cell lines, rather than pretty much deliberately going out to have a moral confrontation with people who have problems with embryonic stem cell research?

They do, now, and I have read plenty about it as it developed.

Not fair to disparage the press for not writing about this part.

You're right- they have mentioned it more.

Yet many also still harp on embryonic stem cells like the "effective ban" on them is holding back treatments/cures for people, and yet they have not proven to be as fruitful.

So to me, it DOES seem that there are people out there that deliberately want to provoke people.

Cracks me up.

You only have to spend a few hours here to see that.

Since research in this country is effectively limited to using adult stem cell lines, its no wonder that people are getting more results from using adult stem cell lines.

The thing about science is that limiting "where your research is taking you" is never a good thing for the science. But "go where the research leads" should not in my opinion be the only guide when it leads to things that can harm great numbers of people by "getting out of the lab" before the results are in.

I've got a lot of worries about nanoscale particle research (which they do a lot of where I work); no-one knows what the effects of teeny-tiny particles, generally intended for industrial use, are when they're breathed in by people, but the initial findings are "irritants that can cause cancer even when not intrinsically carcinogenic". However, good containment policies at the lab level can, well, contain such results.

But in the case of embryonic stem cell research, no-one is worried that some new pollutant might "get out"; all the stops on research are dictated by a set of religious beliefs not shared by many people.

If it turns out that adult stem cell lines provide "all the stem cell lines we need', so be it; the scientific community doesn't know that based on the current curtailment, in the US, of research only to adult stem cell lines.*

*When the institution received federal money for any of its other other research, that is (see my articles above). And, face it, there just aren't that many completely privately funded facilities (see my articles above).

[quote="Ritterskoop"]Time has an article on A-Z health items in the U.S.

One of the S items is stem cell research, in which they say in 2001 President Bush "banned the use of most embryonic stem cells".

I have written them to inquire since when is restricting funding the same thing as a ban? This has irritated me for years. Whether we agree or not he should have made such a ruling (I do NOT want to get into that), the fact remains that nobody banned or outlawed anything. They said they would not provide public money for stem cell lines created after that date.

Researchers who could drum up private money have been free to do whatever tests they wanted on whatever stem cells they could ethically obtain.

I have seen this statement about the ban (and variations of it) made so many times over the past several years, I began to doubt myself tonight. But I just went to the NIH website and read the text of his August 2001 statement. There are no bans. It is not illegal. It simply became harder to accomplish because the public money was going away, but that's not relevant to its legality.



that annoys me as well

BigDrawMan wrote:that annoys me as well

It annoys me that BDM still hasn't figured out how to use the "quote" function.

TheCalvinator24 wrote:

BigDrawMan wrote:that annoys me as well

It annoys me that BDM still hasn't figured out how to use the "quote" function.

This cracks me up!

Not that Beedums can't use the quote function but that Cal says it annoys him.

Very funny stuff.