Christian Coalition Urges Senate to Delay Embryonic Stem Cell Vote

Christian Coalition of America urges Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to delay the Senate vote on the bill allowing federal tax dollars to be used on human embryo stem cell destruction, the Castle-DeGette bill passed earlier this summer in the U.S. House of Representatives sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter, because of promising exciting breakthroughs in production of large amounts of embryonic like stem cells from umbilical cord blood. This breakthrough should effectively stop the unethical research resulting in the killing of human embryos.

Roberta Combs, President of the Christian Coalition of America said,

"Now there is no reason for the Senate leadership to schedule a vote this year, or ever, on the bill forcing taxpayers to pay for the immoral destruction of human embryos, after the exciting announcement of promising cord blood research. A majority of the American people in a published poll in May (52%) oppose federal funding for this gruesome research while only 36% of the American people support such funding. Not only has such human embryo destruction research produced no results whatsoever, it now is unnecessary."

Christian Coalition Urges Bill Frist to Delay Embryonic Stem Cell Vote

Stem Cell Debate Advancing

The discovery that teams from Texas and UK have made - produce stem cells from umbilical cord blood may lead to a potential end of the ethical debate affecting stem cell research.

The researchers' findings come less than a month after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist surprised Capitol Hill by endorsing a bill to make more embryonic stem-cell research eligible for federal funding, breaking with Mr. Bush, who has said he would veto the legislation.

David Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences for the Family Research Council, which advocates cord-blood and other adult stem-cell research that does not require destruction of embryos, said the research sounds "real exciting."

Mr. Prentice said it is especially interesting because it comes just two weeks after scientists at the University of Pittsburgh announced they have discovered a type of cell in the human placenta that also shares the ability of embryonic stem cells to regenerate a wide variety of tissue.

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In His Meeteings With State Voters Frist Is Defending Stem Cell Research

The Tennessee senator, U-S Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is saying that he is still pro-life, but as a heart surgeon he has used to transplant tissue from one person to give life to someone else.

So now, while Congress is on recess, Frist has scheduled a series of visits across Tennessee answering questions about his support for federal funding for stem cell research, as he broke with President Bush on the stem cell issue in a speech on the Senate floor last month.

Opponents of the research consider it the equivalent of abortion because embryos must be destroyed to harvest the stem cells...

Medford Couple Plan To Clone Their Beloved Pet — Would You Clone Yours?

The question of cloning has come to a neighborhood near you. It arrived almost exactly a year ago, when Roland and Mary Ann Daniels moved from Costa Mesa, Calif., to Medford’s east side.

The pair arrived without their 20-year-old cat, Smokey, who died on Aug. 26, just as they signed papers on their new Oregon home.

"The vet called and said he wouldn’t last until we got there," said Mary Ann Daniels, 58, an accountant. "We were devastated."

Grieved as they were, the couple took comfort from the fact that they’d paid about $1,000 three years earlier to have Smokey’s cells harvested and stored at Genetic Savings and Clone Inc., the Texas-based firm that bills itself as the world’s leading pet cloning company.

"We wanted to be on the forefront of this," said Mary Ann Daniels, who read about the procedure in a Time magazine article.

"We wanted to be one of the first."

Smokey was not just another cat, the Danielses explained. The Blue Russian with the huge green eyes showed up on their patio when he was a kitten. For the next two decades, he monitored every move his owners made — and the attachment was mutual...


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Battle For Research Funding Emerges In Stem Cell Debate

A campaign to secure state money for stem cell research has started in Missouri, as well with a battle raging over the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, which has built a $300 million laboratory and stocked it with sophisticated machines for nearly 200 scientists recruited from as far afield as China and Argentina.

Yet social conservatives in the Missouri Legislature are effectively blocking some of the most ambitious research envisioned by the Stowers staff, saying that research with embryonic stem cells is so immoral it should be a crime.

"I believe that a human embryo is worthy of legal protection[...] Western medicine has been founded on a principle: First, do no harm." said state Senator Matt Bartle, Republican of Missouri, who vows to press the fight.

Repeated legislative efforts by Bartle and his colleagues forced the Stowers Institute to curtail recruiting and stop planning for a second 600,000-square-foot facility. At the same time, those efforts have spurred creation of an impromptu statewide alliance of business leaders, science advocates, and antiabortion Republicans who favor the research for reasons of healthcare and job growth.

Advocates in Missouri and beyond expect the outcome to have broad implications for politics and science as states struggle to define the limits of medical inquiry. This is true whether the research money comes from private pockets, as in Kansas City, or the public treasury, as in California, where $3 billion approved by voters has been blocked by lawsuits and legislative maneuvers.

Just last month, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, announced that he had helped hide $10 million in the state budget that will now be used for embryonic stem cell research. Several leading Republicans criticized him for the move, and the Catholic Conference of Illinois said he ''betrayed his own office, both morally and politically."

South Dakota forbids research on all embryos, yet New Jersey is bankrolling an embryonic stem cell program. In New York City, a private foundation recently gave $50 million to three medical institutions for early stem cell work to sustain the city's research credentials.[...]


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Ethicist Proposes Embryonic Stem Cell Research Policy

DURHAM, N.C., Aug. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The debate over human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research can be informed by a line of moral reasoning thus far overlooked in legislative drafting, according to Louis M. Guenin, lecturer on ethics in science at Harvard Medical School, whose commentary will be published in the journal Stem Cells and is available now as an early online publication in Stem Cells Express.

Guenin writes that the overlooked reasoning starts from the premise that a woman's decision declining transfer of her externally created embryo into her, or into anyone else, is a morally permissible exercise of discretion; and further, that an embryo barred by such a decision from the womb does not correspond to a possible person and cannot gain anything from being classified as an actual person.

"Embryos barred from the womb and donated to medicine," Guenin observes, "present us with a means by which we might relieve suffering in actual lives at no cost in potential lives."

Guenin proposes a policy by which "the government shall support biomedical research using human embryos that, before or after formation, have been donated to medicine under donor instructions forbidding intrauterine transfer." This policy "wears its justification on its sleeve," he writes, and optimizes the scope of research, resting both use and creation of embryos on the same moral ground.

In regard to reproductive cloning, Guenin maintains that because the FDA has effectively interdicted the practice, the likely incidence in the U.S. is nil. Hence anticloning legislation would be at best redundant, at worst a platform for barring valuable research. His commentary makes reference to the Dickey Amendment, which bars federal funding of research in which human embryos are created or destroyed, and the pending Castle-DeGette bill which would partially override it.

Guenin, co-chair of the ethics committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, has written extensively on the morality of embryo use in medicine.


Stem Cells, an international peer-reviewed journal, provides a forum for original investigative papers and concise reviews. It is written and read by clinical and basic scientists whose expertise encompasses the rapidly expanding fields of stem and progenitor cell biology. http://www.StemCells.com

Abstract online:
http://stemcells.alphamedpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/2005-0202v1?ck=nck

CONTACT:
Laurel Ferejohn, Communications
LaurelFerejohn@AlphaMedPress.com
Tel.: 919-680-0011 ext. 234
Fax: 919-680-4411

Controversial Stem Cell Issue in Tallahassee

The debate is moving now to Tallahassee as a first-term lawmaker from Broward County announced plans last week to file legislation next year that would promote and pay for embryonic stem-cell research.

The move comes just two weeks after a Palm Beach County group launched a campaign to put a constitutional amendment on next year's ballot to force Florida to do the same, plus encourage the even more contentious process of therapeutic cloning.

"What if we said we didn't want to do research on polio? Is it better for everyone to get polio? Of course not," said Rep. Franklin Sands, the Weston Democrat whose legislation would allow researchers to use only embryonic stem cells produced by in-vitro fertilization that aren't implanted and would otherwise be discarded.

Amendment backers will have to collect more than 611,000 signatures in less than six months, an exhaustive and expensive process. The legislation, meanwhile, faces hurdles of its own - such as Gov. Jeb Bush.

Bush opposes embryonic stem-cell research because, he said, it encourages people to create human embryos solely to destroy them.

"It's a contradiction, I think, morally for us to pursue this option when there are other alternatives," Bush said.


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Anti-abortion Group Files Lawsuit to Stop Research at California's Stem Cell Institute

A national anti-abortion group has served the administrators of California's stem cell institute with a federal lawsuit seeking to stop their work, based on the fact that the civil rights of frozen embryos are violated by stem cell research.

The lawsuit was delivered during a monthly meeting of the institute's oversight committee at the University of California San Diego around the same time as committee Chairman Robert Klein was announcing that several lawsuits filed in state court had been consolidated to be heard by one judge, in one county, on an expedited basis.

That litigation has blocked the sale of government-backed bonds to fund the institute, which is supposed to award $300 million annually for stem cell research.

The federal lawsuit, filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children, could now further delay the sale of bonds.

The lawsuit appears to be identical to one filed against the National Institutes of Health and dismissed after the 4th Circuit court determined it had no legal standing. The court said federal funding restrictions placed on embryonic stem cell research by President Bush in 2002 made the case against the NIH moot.


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Cardinal Urges Veto of Embryonic Stem Cell Legislation

The head of the U.S. bishops' pro-life committee has encouraged President George W. Bush to veto any legislation that would loosen restrictions on FEDERALLY funded (notice that it doesn't say privately funded)human embryonic stem-cell research.

The statement was issued by Baltimore Cardinal William H. Keeler, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee for Pro-Life Activities, after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., modified his stand to back legislation that would relax restrictions.

Frist's support improves chances that the Senate will pass a bill easing restrictions when it returns in September from its summer recess. The House already passed such a bill.

"I commend President Bush for his laudable pledge to veto such legislation," said Cardinal Keeler in a July 29 statement.

The cardinal's statement was issued in Washington by the U.S. bishops' Department of Communications hours after Frist, who previously agreed with Bush's restrictions, said in a Senate speech that the Bush policy was hindering research that could lead to cures for a number of diseases.


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Republican Sen. Has To Stand Behind Stem Cell Research Funding To win Election

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate will have to stand behind stem cell research funding or lose the election, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Sunday.

Specter told CBS' "Face the Nation" the Tennessee Republican's stance "will be helpful" to him in a presidential bid.

"Republicans want to nominate somebody who can be re-elected," Specter said. "And I think the way the matter is pending now, I don't think a presidential candidate opposed to stem cells could be elected."

Taking the opposite view, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., a possible presidential candidate in 2008, said any federal funding for embryonic stem cell research could begin a slippery slope towards human cloning for research or other purposes. Brownback said many Americans see it that way.


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Clergy Denounce Frist on Stem Cell Research

WASHINGTON, July 29 /Christian Wire Service/ -- The National Clergy Council, that has consistently supported Senator Bill Frist, today strongly denounced him for his announced support of embryonic stem cell research.

The Reverend Rob Schenck (pronounced SHANK), National Clergy Council President, issued this statement on behalf of the Council's executive committee representing church leaders of Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox and Protestant traditions:

"In saying that he believes life begins at conception but that he supports embryonic stem cell research, Senator Frist's position not only contradicts itself, it flies in the face of biblical and historical Christian moral teaching. It's the same as saying that we should use condemned criminals for medical experimentation because they're going to die anyway. It is morally incoherent. Senator Frist can no longer count on our support nor the support of the wider Evangelical or Catholic communities."

Rev. Schenck is available for further comment at 202-546-8329, ext 106 or mobile, 703-447-7686.


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Family Action founder and chairman Dr. James Dobson Unhappy With Frist's Decision

“It is an understatement to say that the pro-life community is disappointed by Sen. Frist's decision to join efforts to void President Bush's policy limiting the funding of embryonic stem-cell research. Most distressing is that, in making his announcement, Sen. Frist calls himself a defender of the sanctity of human life -- even though the research he now advocates results, without exception, in the destruction of human life.

"Sen. Frist argues that under the Bush policy, there are insufficient stem-cell lines to maximize what he calls the 'promise' of embryonic stem-cell research. That statement continues the common misconception that embryonic stem cells hold the greatest potential for human healing and therapy. In reality, recently published studies demonstrate that some adult stem cells can form most, if not all, body tissues, just like embryonic cells may be able to do. Furthermore, there will never be a sufficient number of new stem-cell lines to satisfy the sometimes unquenchable thirst for federal money to fund pet projects of researchers. A morally sound line must be drawn at the beginning of this journey into stem-cell research: that no human life is sacrificed for possible or proven scientific gain – period.

"The media have already begun speculating that Sen. Frist's announcement today is designed to improve his chances of winning the White House in 2008 should he choose to run. If that is the case, he has gravely miscalculated. To push for the expansion of this suspect and unethical science will be rightly seen by America's values voters as the worst kind of betrayal – choosing politics over principle.

"We urge Sen. Frist to reconsider his position in light of the values he has espoused during his career in public service."

For more information, contact Paul Hetrick at ( 719 ) 531-3336 or press@family.org, or Christopher Norfleet at ( 719 ) 548-4570 or culturalissues@family.org.