Has change come to biology?
By John Timmer,
arts technica
| 02. 02. 2009
Stem cell research under Obama
President Obama's promise to restore science to its rightful place has raised the hopes of biologists that there will be swift action on what many view as a serious hindrance to biology: restrictions on the use of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Federal funding of hESC research has been limited to lines created before August 9th, 2001—nearly nine years ago—and most of the acceptable lines have since been found to be inappropriate for clinical research; ethical issues involving informed consent affect the remaining handful. On Tuesday, the New York Stem Cell foundation hosted a panel that discussed how a lifting of the Bush-era restrictions on hESC research is likely to change hESC research.
The panel included two members that had been part of the Obama transition team: Alta Charo, who focuses on bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus of Sloan-Kettering, who is now serving on Obama's Science and Technology advisory panel. Lawrence Tabak of the NIH provided some perspective on what his agency would need to do, and Harvard's Kevin Eggan spoke as...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...