A. Non-embryonic stem cell lines involve cells that are more differentiated and thus less capable of being programmed into various cell lines.
Why not do this research with non-embryonic stem cell lines?
Doerflinger said his group is in favor of federal funding of research on non-embryonic stem cell lines, using adult tissue, or tissue from fetuses which died of natural causes.
Instead of generating embryonic stem cell lines via nuclear transfer, Hwang's group produced the stem cells from days-old embryos, a technique that had already been established by James Thomson at University of Wisconsin in 1998.
One possible compromise is to fund only research using the embryonic stem cell lines that already exist, and refuse funding for research that relies on future destruction of embryos, even if the cells are collected in the private sector.
Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who heads the committee, requested the names of the research groups who have human embryonic stem cell lines, information on where their research has been published, and details about proprietary rights and what ethical standards were used when the stem cells were derived.
Once you've got them, you don't need to destroy any more embryos, but each time you get a new one of these embryonic stem-cell lines, you need to destroy an embryo.
It barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time.
Opponents of embryonic stem cell research, which involves destroying the donated embryos from which cell lines are derived, have long argued that the discovery of iPS cells in 2006 (for which Shinya Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine this past year) obviates the need for embryonic stem cell research.
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In 2001, President George W. Bush banned all federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, except on a handful of "pre-existing" stem cell lines.
Federal research funds were prohibited for embryonic stem-cell research until August 2001, when Bush approved spending for research using only already-existing cell lines.
"I don't see it as a compromise, but as a transitional step" to a "full blown" policy of federally financing embryonic stem cell research, Doerflinger said, adding that if researchers found the experiments on the small number of cell lines promising, they would want to create even more cell lines, and that would create pressure to allow tax dollars to be used for more experiments.
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