Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
holocaust, and influenced by the philosophy of its native son, immanuel
Kant, Germany strives to avoid even the appearance of insensitivity when
it comes to using human beings in medical research.
in no country is funding for esC research more subject to the winds
of politics than it is in the United states. on August 9, 2001, President
George W. Bush declared that no federal funds could be used for research
on esCs created after that date.
16
Twice the Us Congress passed legisla-
tion to end the 2001 presidential restrictions on esC research, and twice
the president vetoed the legislation. on march 9, 2009, President Barack
obama revoked the Bush policy on esC research and allowed federal grant
researchers to work on esC lines created since the 2001 prohibition so long
as creation of the cell lines follows federal ethical guidelines. This is a boon
to esC researchers in public institutions and hospitals in the United states
because many esC lines were created by privately funded research during
the eight years of the Bush restrictions.
federal funds cannot be used to actually create new esC lines in the
United states. Doing so would violate the Dickey-Wicker Amendment
passed by the (newton) Gingrich Congress near the end of President
William (Bill) Clinton's first term in office. The amendment prohibits use
of federal monies for the creation or destruction of human embryos for
research purposes, and the legislation has been renewed every year since
1995. While Dickey-Wicker restricts the use of federal dollars for esC re-
search, no Us federal law prohibits using state or private monies to create
new esC lines or to pursue therapeutic cloning.
revised national institutes of health (nih) guidelines for federally
funded human esC research were instituted on July 7, 2009 (national in-
stitutes of health 2009). The new guidelines allow researchers to apply for
nih grants to work on human esCs that were derived from surplus em-
bryos produced by ivf for reproductive purposes. however, the nih does
not support research that introduces human esCs into nonhuman embryos
or that uses human esCs created by sCnT (i.e., cloning, fig. 2.8), by par-
thenogenesis (embryo creation without the use of sperm), or from embryos
created solely for research. in June 2010, some prolife groups, including
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