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Reuters
Bush would veto House bill on stem cells

By Steve Holland 58 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
President Bush said on Friday he would veto legislation that would loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and expressed concern about human cloning research in
South Korea.
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In the House of Representatives, supporters of embryonic research sponsored by Republican Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware and Democratic Rep. Diane DeGette of Colorado hope for a vote next week and believe it will be close.

Bush said the bill would violate his principles.

"I've made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life -- I'm against that. And therefore if the bill does that, I will veto it," Bush told reporters during a picture-taking session with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Bush imposed restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2001. Supporters of loosening the restrictions believe broader research could help develop treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's.

A South Korean scientist said on Friday a groundbreaking study on stem cell research was funded with less than $200,000 a year in largely government grants. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University said they had successfully created batches of embryonic stem cells from patients.

"I'm very concerned about cloning," Bush said. "I worry about a world in which cloning would be acceptable."

Castle's legislation would expand the number of stem cell lines that are eligible for federally funded research.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that Bush was not opposed to all stem cell research.

"First of all the president is committed to human embryonic stem cell research. There's a misperception that he is opposed to such research. He is not," Duffy said.

But the president holds to "a principle that human life should not be created for the sole purpose of destroying it, and especially taxpayer dollars, public money, should not go for that type of practice that many, many, many Americans find morally offensive," Duffy said.


Thanks alot George

but the rest of the world advances on this

Scientists clone human stem cells from patients

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent 1 hour, 46 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Korean scientists who cloned the first human embryo to use for research said on Thursday they have used the same technology to create batches of embryonic stem cells from nine patients.
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Their study fulfills one of the basic promises of using cloning technology in stem cell research -- that a piece of skin could be taken from a patient and used to grow the stem cells.

Researchers believe the cells could one day be trained to provide tailored tissue and organ transplants to cure juvenile diabetes,
Parkinson's disease and even to repair severed spinal cords. Unlike so-called adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells have the potential from the beginning to form any cell or tissue in the body.

Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues at Seoul National University report their process is much more efficient than they hoped, and yielded 11 stem cell batches, called lines, from six adults and three children with spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes and a rare immune disorder.

"This study shows that embryonic stem cells can be derived using nuclear transfer from patients with illness ... regardless of sex or age," Hwang told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"I am amazed at how much they have accomplished in just a year and the amount, the quality and the rigorousness of their evidence," Dr. Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, a stem cell expert who reviewed the study, said in a telephone interview.

While the patients whose cells were copied do not stand at this time to benefit, the researchers hope to study the cells to understand their conditions better.

They also say their method may be less controversial than other work with embryonic stem cells because, by their definition, a human embryo was never actually created.

The report, published in the journal Science, is certain to add to the growing U.S. political controversy over the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Opponents say all such work is unethical and should be banned because human life begins at conception and should not be destroyed.

NO HUMAN EMBRYO

Hwang said his method differs from that first used to derive human embryonic stem cells in 1998 and he proposes using a new term for the cloned embryos -- a "nuclear transfer construct."

"I think this construct is not an embryo," he said. "There is no fertilization in our process. We use nuclear transfer technology. I can say this result is not an embryo but a nuclear transfer construct."

The sheep Dolly, the first adult mammal cloned, was made using nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus is removed from an egg cell, replaced with the nucleus of the animal or person to be cloned, and then fused. The egg begins dividing as if it had been fertilized and sometimes becomes an embryo.

Cattle, pigs, sheep, cats and other animals have been cloned using this method.

Schatten said when scientists first got stem cells from human embryos in 1998, they broke open the little days-old ball of cells called a blastocyst.

In the current study, he said, they simply laid down the blastocyst in a lab dish filled with human "feeder cells."

David Magnus and Mildred Cho of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics in California agreed.

"There is no reason ever to believe one of these things could ever become a human being," said Magnus, who with Cho wrote a commentary on the work.

"Even for people that believe that potentiality is the key to personhood, these things, whatever they are, they are not people. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is an ethically better way of producing stem cells than using excess IVF (in vitro fertilization or test-tube baby) embryos."

Schatten said the method could also eventually do away with the need for some animal experiments, which some people also find objectionable and which others say is not always a good way to predict human medical treatments.

Opponents of stem cell research had not had an opportunity to review the paper and could not immediately comment.





Seoul National University professor Woo Suk-Hwang © is surrounded by journalists on his arrival at Incheon airport, west of Seoul, May 20, 2005. South Korean scientists who cloned the first human embryo to use for research said on May 19, 2005 they have used the same technology to create batches of embryonic stem cells from nine patients. Their study fulfills one of the basic promises of using cloning technology in stem cell research -- that a piece of skin could be taken from a patient and used to grow the stem cells. (Pool/Reuters)