Stem-Cell Research Funding Institute Is Shuttered 86
An anonymous reader writes "The National Institutes of Health, the top funder of biomedical research in the U.S., has closed a program designed to bring induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from the lab to the clinic. It has made no public mention of the closure, but the website has been deleted and Nature News reports that the center director, Mahendra Rao, resigned his post in frustration after the program allocated funds to only one clinical trial in its last round of funding."
Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research? (Score:4, Informative)
"James Anderson, director of the NIHâ(TM)s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which administered the CRM, counters that only one application - that made by Kapil Bharti of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda and his colleagues - received a high enough score from an external review board to justify continued funding."
You can take this at face value, or assume academic politics, but it doesn't seem like party politics.
Sequester strikes again (Score:4, Informative)
It's not because of the subject that the research is being stopped. The NIH, along with the NSF and NASA, had its science budget cut during the sequester and it hasn't recovered. Lots of programs all over the country are being discontinued as a result.
Waybackmachine on Dr. Mahendra Rao (Score:4, Informative)
"Dr. Mahendra Rao is internationally renowned for his research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and other somatic stem cells. He has worked in the stem cell field for more than 20 years, with stints in academia, government and regulatory affairs and industry. He received his M.D. from Bombay University in India and his Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology.
Following postdoctoral training at Case Western Reserve University, he established his research laboratory in neural development at the University of Utah. He next joined the National Institute on Aging as chief of the Neurosciences Section, where he studied neural progenitor cells and continued to explore his longstanding interest in their clinical potential.
Most recently, he spent six years as the vice president of Regenerative Medicine at Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California. He co-founded Q Therapeutics, a neural stem cell company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also served internationally on advisory boards for companies involved in stem cell processing and therapy; on committees, including as the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationâ(TM)s Cellular Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee chair; and as the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine and International Society for Stem Cell Research liaison to the International Society for Cellular Therapy." ref [archive.org]
Re:Correcting Lies (Score:5, Informative)
Odd definition of "Lie"
What happened was that there was ongoing funding of stem-cell research, much of it government-funded. However, there's an existing law that forbids any government funding of abortion. When fetal stem-cell research became a possibility [wikipedia.org], President Clinton issued an executive order saying that research didn't count against the law. Then he left office, and President Bush (II) issued his own order saying it did qualify (at least for any new fetal tissues). When president Obama took office, he issued his own order saying it was OK again.
Yes, all that was banned was new fetal tissue research. But that was where the new research was being done at the time, so its a distinction without much difference.
Today Congress is (perhaps inadvertently) getting around this re-funding by simply blanket defunding all government funding of research (along with everything else). This was the only kind of "budget" they could agree to. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama though. Sure, he signed the law for the current qasi-budget we operate under, but only because it was the best we were ever likely to get out of a House of Reps (yes, run by Republicans) that reflexively votes against anything he so much as says a kind word about.
Perhaps the Republican goal wasn't to defund stem-cell research, but that's certainly the effect. At some point incompetence becomes advanced enough that it is indistinguishable from malice.
Re:Sequester strikes again (Score:0, Informative)
Just remember- the sequester was proposed by the thief-in-chief himself, the almighty liberal savior, Obama.