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 Who's running the show? On March 9, 2009 and again at the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama called for government scientific policy to be developed on the basis of scientific facts, not politics or ideology.
With that declaration he called for a lifting of the ban on federal funding of research on embryonic [pluripotent] stem [ES] cells imposed by President Bush on August 9, 2001. Bush had banned funding of both new ES lines, but also producing pluripotent stem cell lines by SCNT. In SCNT, the nucleus from a body cell of an adult individual is transferred into an egg that had its own chromosome removed, stimulating the NT egg to divide, and rescuing the pluripotent cells from that entity. SCNT has been done tens of times in mice, and a few times with nonhuman primates. In mice, if the donor has a genetic disease, the pluripotent stem cell line has those genes, and if these stem cells are incorporated into a developing mouse, the cells and the mouse may get that disease. So the science says one can capture a disease in a pluripotent stem cell line, and have the expectation that the disease can be understood and eventually treated; the cell line is the basis for both, including drug screening.
So when the NIH listed their guidelines in draft form, and again last week in final form, you would have expected the guidelines to allow federal funding for cell lines derived both from excess in vitro fertilization [IVF] clinic embryos and from SCNT sources. Of course, NIH and congress and we the people are also required to break no law and in the cases of the use of humans or their tissues in medical research to have stringent guidelines set by medical ethics of safety for all concerned. Instead, NIH made the guidelines for IVF derivation include informed consent from egg and sperm donor, a problem for many of the Bush-funded lines. And the NIH guidelines banned funding of SCNT lines, no matter how efficiently and ethically obtained, and no matter how valuable to study disease. NIH Director Kington said that the American people are against SCNT, and so that's why it's banned.
So in fact the NIH take on the politics of we the people made the decision, not the NIH's mandate to advance medical science for the benefit of [at least] Americans. Obama’s declaration of freeing the federal science enterprise from politics, ideology, religious opinion, etc. was and is the clearest and perhaps the most important statement on science policy in my lifetime. The NIH guidelines brought by his employees is not in the spirit of that speech. As the NIH guidelines are the first practical test of the Obama Doctrine, one has to ask, ”who’s running the show”?
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