Aggregated News
Officials at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be kept busy for the next four months as they craft new guidelines specifying which embryonic stem (ES) cell research will now qualify for federal funding. But that hasn't stopped the first rumblings of a fight over what the country's regulatory framework might eventually look like.
President Obama's executive order does not overturn the Dickey–Wicker Amendment, a 13-year-old ban on federal funding for the actual creation of new stem cell lines, an act that destroys an embryo. In the United States these efforts must be funded privately or by state governments.
Ruth Macklin, a professor of bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is among those who support a regulatory agency patterned after the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, in existence since 1990. The HFEA oversees the creation, storage and use of embryos for research, and regulates fertility clinics. Beyond laying out enforceable rules for ES cell science in the United States, she says, a similar scheme would bring order to the largely unregulated in vitro...
President Obama's executive order does not overturn the Dickey–Wicker Amendment, a 13-year-old ban on federal funding for the actual creation of new stem cell lines, an act that destroys an embryo. In the United States these efforts must be funded privately or by state governments.
Ruth Macklin, a professor of bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is among those who support a regulatory agency patterned after the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, in existence since 1990. The HFEA oversees the creation, storage and use of embryos for research, and regulates fertility clinics. Beyond laying out enforceable rules for ES cell science in the United States, she says, a similar scheme would bring order to the largely unregulated in vitro...