Doctor Shocks Oprah with News of Ethical Stem-Cell Successes

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U.S. Lawmakers Fight to Remove Law, Signed by Obama, against Federal Funding for Embryo Research

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 17, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - While President Obama's executive order last week abolished former President George Bush's order forbidding taxpayer funds from being used for embryo-destructive research, the move did not address current U.S. law that bans federal funds from being used for the creation and destruction of embryos. Anti-life legislators are now working to repeal the pro-life law as the next logical step to completely free up funds for embryonic stem-cell research.

Just two days after signing the embryonic stem cell research executive order, Obama signed the annual omnibus appropriations bill, which since 1995 has included an amendment that forbids federal funds from facilitating the harm or destruction of life.

Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, the language states: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes, or research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

Obama's executive order only states that embryonic stem cell research would be allowed "to the extent permitted by law."

Peter Breen, an attorney with the pro-life Thomas More Society, told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) that the Dickey-Wicker law prohibits the president from authorizing funds for research that creates or destroys embryos. However, because of the executive order, funds can now go to research on stem cells taken from embryos already destroyed via private funding. The Bush executive order had restricted such research to the cell lines of embryos destroyed before August 2001.

A White House official recently confirmed to the Cybercast News Service (CNS) that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government's medical research arm, will be drafting guidelines to perform research in compliance with the Dickey-Wicker law.

But now that President Obama has lifted the Bush ban, legislators have set to work to abolish the Dickey-Wicker language from next year's appropriations bill, thereby completely freeing up federal funds for embryo research.

Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Mike Castle, R-Del., are working to repeal the amendment.

"Dickey-Wicker is 13 years old now, and I think we need to review these policies," DeGette told the New York Times. The Times published an editorial Tuesday urging Congress to do away with the law.

Rep. Mike Castle, a Republican co-sponsor of Rep. DeGette's bill, said the law is "something we need to look at."

"That was passed in 1996, before we realized the full potential of embryonic stem cell research. Some researchers are telling us now that that needs to be reversed," he told the Congressional Quarterly on Monday.

But pro-life leaders are warning that removing the law would give free rein to scientists eager to create, manipulate, and destroy countless human lives.

On the same day that Obama signed his controversial executive order, Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee pointed out that Obama's order "sets the stage for an attack" on the Dickey-Wicker amendment, the removal of which would have dire consequences.

"Many researchers are already demanding federal support for research in which human embryos would be created for the specific purpose of research, through human cloning and other methods, and there was nothing in the President's remarks today to limit NIH to the use of so-called surplus embryos created in IVF clinics," said Johnson.

"Any member of Congress who votes for legislation to repeal this law is voting to allow federal funding of human embryo farms, created through the use of human cloning."

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) told the Times that he doubts the public would approve of discarding the law.

"I don't think it will fly because the movement in the country is in favor of life," said Smith. "For Congress to say that the new guinea pig will be human embryos, most Americans will find that highly offensive."

Bishop: "President Obama is forcing all American taxpayers to pay for this homicidal research"

PHOENIX, March 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Bishop of Phoenix in Arizona has written a straight-talking column responding to President Barack Obama's executive order providing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

"This means that American taxpayers will now be paying for the killing of human beings at a very early stage in their lives (as embryos), so that scientific research can make use of them for experiments that may or may not yield positive results," writes Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in his diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Sun.

Unwilling to sugar-coat the reality with polite euphemisms, Bishop Olmsted says, "We U.S. taxpayers will now be forced to pay, whether we wish to or not, for the killing of our youngest brothers and sisters on the dubious hypothesis that their murders might, in the future, benefit others."

"What President Obama is doing is forcing all American taxpayers to pay for this homicidal research," he said.

The Bishop offers five ways in which Catholics should respond to the President's action. "First, we must beg forgiveness for this horrendous sin of our nation," he says. "Second, we Catholics must join with others of good will and make our voices heard across our land, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, in our state Legislatures and in the media. We must not stand by idly while our neighbor's life is at stake. The dignity of a human person does not depend upon his or her age, developmental stage, or ability to function."

To read more see the full column here.

Report: Fetal Stem Cells Trigger Tumors in Sick Child's Brain, Spinal Cord

WASHINGTON — A family desperate to save a child from a lethal brain disease sought highly experimental injections of fetal stem cells — injections that triggered tumors in the boy's brain and spinal cord, Israeli scientists reported Tuesday.

Scientists are furiously trying to harness different types of stem cells — the building blocks for other cells in the body — to regrow damaged tissues and thus treat devastating diseases. But for all the promise, researchers have long warned that they must learn to control newly injected stem cells so they don't grow where they shouldn't, and small studies in people are only just beginning.

Tuesday's report in the journal PLoS Medicine is the first documented case of a human brain tumor — albeit a benign, slow-growing one — after fetal stem cell therapy, and hammers home the need for careful research. The journal is published by the Public Library of Science.

"Patients, please beware," said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn't involved in the Israeli boy's care but who sees similarly desperate U.S. patients head abroad to clinics that offer unproven stem cell injections.

"Cells are not drugs. They can misbehave in so many different ways, it just is going to take a good deal of time" to prove how best to pursue the potential therapy, Gearhart said.

The unidentified Israeli boy has a rare, fatal genetic disease with a tongue-twisting name — ataxia telangiectasia, or A-T. Degeneration of a certain brain region gradually robs these children of movement. Plus, a faulty immune system leads to frequent infections and cancers. Most die in their teens or early 20s.

Israeli doctors pieced together the child's history: When he was 9, the family traveled to Russia, to a Moscow clinic that provided injections of neural stem cells from fetuses — immature cells destined to grow into a main type of brain cells. The cells were injected into his brain and spinal cord twice more, at ages 10 and 12.

Back home in Israel at age 13, the boy's A-T was severe enough to require that he use a wheelchair when he also began complaining of headaches. Tests at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv uncovered a growth pushing on his brain stem and a second on his spinal cord. Surgeons removed the spinal cord mass when the boy was 14, in 2006 and they say his general condition has remained stable since then.

But was the boy prone to tumors anyway or were the fetal stem cells to blame? A Tel Aviv University team extensively tested the tumor tissue and concluded it was the fetal cells. Among other evidence, some of the cells were female and had two normal copies of the gene that causes A-T — although that boy's underlying poor immune function could have allowed the growths to take hold.

Using stem cells from multiple fetuses that also were mixed with growth-spurring compounds "may have created a high-risk situation where abnormal growth of more than one cell occurred," wrote lead researcher Dr. Ninette Amariglio of Sheba Medical. She urged better research to "maximize the potential benefits of regenerative medicine while minimizing the risks."

This brain disease wasn't conducive to stem cell therapy in the first place, said stem cell specialist Dr. Marius Wernig of Stanford University, who said it's unclear exactly what was implanted.

"Stem cell transplantations have a humongous potential," Wernig said. But "if people rush out there without really knowing what they're doing ... that really backfires and can bring this whole field to a halt."