Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2009

Gknowmx — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:43:47 GMT

This is a useful website to follow the progress of legislation in progress to overcome the ban on Stem Cell research funding:

www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd

Is anyone here actively participating as an expert with this Bill's Sponsors? Any scoop on how things are progressing?

2009 Omnibus Budget Act denies federal funding for embryo research?

Gknowmx — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:38:32 GMT

Does anyone have an update on this?

thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D contains the final text of the Federal funding described in the article below:

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/conten...x?RsrcID=44943

Obama Signs Law Banning Federal Embryo Research Two Days After Signing Executive Order to OK It

(CNSNews.com) - On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicitly bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996.

The amendment says, in part: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for—(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

Found in Section 509 of Title V of the omnibus bill (at page 280 of the 465-page document), the federal funding ban not only prohibits the government from providing tax dollars to support research that kills or risks injury to a human embryo, it also mandates that the government use an all-inclusive definition of "human embryo" that encompasses any nascent human life from the moment that life comes into being, even if created in a laboratory through cloning, in vitro fertilization or any other means.

"For the purposes of this section," says the law, "the term ‘human embryo or embryos’ includes any organism … that is derived by fertilization, parthenogenesis, cloning, or any other means from one or more human gametes or human diploid cells." (The entire verbatim text of Section 509 of the omnibus spending law is reprinted at the bottom of this article.)

At a widely publicized White House ceremony on Monday, President Obama signed his own executive order lifting an executive order that President Bush had signed in 2001. While allowing federal funding of research involving embryonic stem cell lines that had already been created from embryos that had already been destroyed, Bush's 2001 order denied federal funding to research that required the killing of any additional embryos. (more in article link)

Stem cell funding driven by clinical applications?

patriciab — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:45:58 GMT

http://www.cirm.ca.gov/press/pdf/20...elease.pdf. One of the largest state-initiatiated funding sources for Stem cell research CIRM (Calif. Institute for Regenerative Medicine) recently made basic biology grants a lower priority for funding and raised priority for disease research that would lead to clinical trials within next 4 years . Is this sort of prioritization going to undermine the 'feeder layer' for clinical trials? Is the demand for therapeutic applications driving stem cell research at the expense of basic science? Are basic scientists starting to feel the pressure to partner with clinical groups to obtain funding?

Stem Cell Standard Funding

Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2009

2009 Omnibus Budget Act denies federal funding for embryo research?

Stem cell funding driven by clinical applications?