RunningMn9 wrote:Who banned research on them?
And you will *NOT* sigh at me again.
Sigh.
Here's the issue. Mind you, prop 71 hasn't passed yet, but if it does, here's the deal: CA has said it will give 3 billion to stem cell research over 10 years. That's 300 mill per year, which sounds like an amazing amount, right?
Not really. Federal funding is
so much more than that. In 2001, (most recent figures I could find, but it's the yearly average up to then), the NIH gave Johns Hopkins alone 334 million for research in grants. 300 million is a lot to fund one subject as Prop 71 is geared to fund, I'll give you that, but it's not an amazing amount, especially in a young research field where research will be extremely costly (no established procedures to go by, as an example, and man labor hours will be quite long). Reason why I brought up the prion example is simply that; sometimes it takes 20 years to work it out; sometimes much, much longer. And universities would probably spend 10-15% (or more) of their budget on stem cell research if they could; it is such a hot topic, it's the future of medicine.
I used the term "banned" almost euphemistically. The government has restricted stem cell research to only those created before August 9, 2001. However, if you're familiar with basic cell biology, you can replicate and replace cells only so long before they start to have issues with genetic instability and viability. According to an article in the May 2003 issue of
Science magazine, those 70 lines that were the lines available for research have dwindled. To 11 viable lines.
11 lines. From my experience working in basic science research (primarily with with heart cells, myocytes), you expect a cell line to be viable for 2-3 years until it's basically "run out". Those are stock, replicating lines. Cell lines that are fragile or nonreproductive (ie heart and nerve cells) need to be freshly harvested. For just our experiment, we harvested 100 neonatal rat hearts a week. It's amazing to me that those 11 embryonic lines have lasted as long as they have.
If the feds don't fund it, you're hoping that CA passes Prop 71 and CA can fund it. Else those 11 still viable lines will die out...and then no one will progress. Without federal funding, there's no funding. And that's basically banning the research. Federal funding is the lifeblood of university research (and obviously, without federal funding, the NIH won't be researching it either). Theoretical research like that on embryonic stem cells won't be conducted by private firms, either (takes too long to show a profit, whereas when the government funds a theoretical research project, privates can adapt the science that the government funding has proven).
