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."
Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless (Score:5, Insightful)
This sucks regardless of what side of the aisle you are on.
There are diseases where the only known effective treatment at this point in time is stem cells. And those are/were in the trial stages.
Fuck politics.
Correcting Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an indépendant but I do hater liars of any stripe - the Republicans only objected to embryonic stem cells, there are lots of other paths and kinds of stem cells.
The Republicans otherwise funded stem cell research.
Re:Correcting Lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research? (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds like the actual reason and the main problem behind iPS. They are about as high of a hanging fruit as there is on that particular tree of science right now. A lot of research into inducing cell into becoming a stem cell has been done, and the only methods that work are extremely difficult and expensive to implement.
As a result, there's a lot less research on the topic, simply because we have already picked all but the highest hanging fruit already. Most methods are either impractical or are being outed as either mistakes or fraud (read up on STAP cells for a good recent example, they were outed as fraud just a week ago by the same research institute that hailed their invention in january). So if internal review board can't find good research, it's likely not because of politics, but because there simply is very little promising research available on the subject.
Re:Correcting Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is that the House has repeatedly passed budgets, and the Demoncrat controlled Senate led by Dingy Harry Reid has refused to take them up.
That's one of those "truths" that folks like to hide lies in. Yes, the House has repeatedly passed budgets, that is true. It is also true that the Senate has repeatedly passed budgets, and Obama has repeatedly submitted budgets he'd be happy to sign to Congress. So everyone's doing their job in good faith, right?
Clearly not. The real truth here is that the House's "budgets" have contained no attempt whatsoever to contain language that has a hope of passing in the Senate, much less get a signature from the POTUS. The House knew full well those budgets wouldn't pass when they voted for them. So pretending these were serious attempts at legislation is a flat out lie.
The Senate's passed budgets, on the other hand, quite often could get a majority in the house (and a POTUS signature). The House deals with this situation that threatens to produce an actual budget by refusing to bring them up for a vote.
So yeah, we could mislead everyone and claim the House has been trying to pass budgets, or we could tell the honest truth.