Popular Science? Congress Revisits Stem Cells

Congress hopes to cast another vote on the bill to expand taxpayer funds for research that destroys human embryos. In the House, leaders will decide whether or not to sign on to the Senate version of the bill, S. 5, which includes slight changes to the initial legislation. Since the House already approved an earlier bill, the vote is simply political theater. In an effort to preemptively rebuke the President's veto, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is using the vote as a public relations stunt to showcase Congress's approval for the research. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which owns the patents to human embryonic stem cells as well as to the process of destroying embryos to get the cells, is fighting to maintain its grisly monopoly after the Patent & Trade Office has indicated it could revoke the patents. The patents provide significant royalties, allowing WARF to profit, with government sanction, from their original embryo destructive research--even if it never yields useful treatments. Is it just me or is something wrong with that picture? While Congress fritters away its time on science that has yielded little in the way of real treatments, the journal Cell Proliferation has published a study on adult stem cells extracted from the umbilical cords of newborns. According to the article, those "adult" cells have been successfully engineered to produce insulin and could soon be used to treat diabetes patients. If Congress is going to spend our hard-earned money, I suggest they put it to better use and fund true progress like this!