Alternative sources of stem cells doesn't pass House
Overlooked in the hype about Bush's veto of "stem cell enhancement bill", which started out as H.B. 810, is the third of the stem cell bill package: S.2754. This bill is intended to direct NIH to fund research to derive human pluripotent stem cell lines using techniques that do not knowingly harm embryos. S.2754 is also known as the Santorum bill.
The Senate passed this bill unanimously (by counting yeas and nays) and turned the bill over to the House for its first consideration. On 18 July, the bill failed to pass, not being agreed to in the House. A motion was made to suspend the rules and pass the bill failed by yeas and nays 273 to 154 (a 2/3 majority is required).
I cannot tell whether the Senate-passed bill is still alive.
One possible reason for problems in the House maybe the bill (HR 5526 IH) the House introduced 6 June with a similar purpose, although--as far as I can tell, the bills are identical.
Marie Godfrey, PhD
One Alternate Source
The conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that embryonic stem cell research is the most likely to lead to the development of a human pluripotent stem cell. But what if you knew it had already been done. . .in humans. . .with a non-embryonic cell?
It has.
PrimeCell Therapeutics in Irvine, Calif. did it this spring. The company has taken stem cells from adult males and reprogrammed those cells to pluripotency, and then reprogrammed them again to grow bone, cartilage, brain and heart cells.
What if pluripotent stem cells were available --- without the ethical problems of working with embryos, and also without the other scientific problems as well?
They can be.
In the fall of 2005, researchers found stem cells in mice and reprogrammed them to become fully pluripotent, and successfully reprogrammed them again to differentiate them into many different types of specific cells from all three germ lines. They’ve done that without the scientific problem of developing teratomas (tumors) that embryonic stem cells have.
And because the cells come from your own body, there are no rejection problems or risk of inheriting genetic defects as would occur with embryonic stem cells.
But what if this model was scientifically confirmed already? The answer is that it has been confirmed by a group of academic researchers in Germany this spring.
However, as we all know, we aren’t really interested in curing mice of their problems. We want to help people. That’s the hope being promised by the supporters of embryonic stem cell research.
But what if we could create fully pluripotent stem cells from non-embryonic cells in humans without the risk of rejection problems? Would everyone still want to spend a lot of time, money and resources trying to find a way to do the very same thing with embryonic stem cells? Probably not. People would want to focus on the technology with the most promise of achieving the goal of helping people the quickest.
Forbes.com recently published an article about this breakthrough technology.
(http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2006/07/21/stem-cell-research-cz_kd_0721stemcell.html)
The promise of the future is here today.