STEM CELL POLITICS: Fingers moving in the hand thats tied.

From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@ocean.com.au)
Date: Mon Mar 17 2003 - 01:01:21 MST

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    Hi Extropes,

    The following article from Science magazine (7 March)
    describes how some progress in embryonic stem cells
    research may still be achieved in the US despite legislative
    restrictions.

    Brett Paatsch

    PS: 2nd email in event of bouncing paatschb@hotmail.com
    --------

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/299/5612/1509

    JAMES BATTEY PROFILE:
    NIH's Man in the Middle of the Stem Cell Debate
    Constance Holden

    "...
    With researchers eager to push ahead and politicians worried
    about moving too fast, NIH's James Battey is trying to strike
    a balance on this controversial topic James Battey knows that
    he works in a fishbowl. As head of a National Institutes of
    Health (NIH) panel managing stem cell research within the
    bounds established by the Bush Administration, Battey hopes
    to satisfy researchers who want to extend the scientific frontier
    without incurring the wrath of politicians who raise the specter
    of "human embryo farms." Last week, the House of
    Representatives reiterated its solid opposition to both
    reproductive and research cloning with human embryos. It
    voted for a total ban on nuclear transplants to create early
    human embryos, which the White House embraced immediately
    in hopes of persuading a divided Senate to follow suit. But the
    241-155 tally in favor of a ban didn't rattle Battey. Six months
    into his stint as the government's point person on the issue, the
    50-year-old cell biologist appears to be obeying his political
    masters without losing the respect of his peers. "He's the one
    who's trying to make the science work," says stem cell
    researcher John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University in
    Baltimore, Maryland. "I think he's in our corner, but it's a very
    narrow corner."

    Not many researchers are familiar with Battey, a 15-year NIH
    veteran whose full-time job is director of the National Institute
    on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Well
    regarded for his research on G protein-coupled receptors
    before moving into administration, Battey was tapped by NIH
    Director Elias Zerhouni to head up a task force that would
    implement the president's decision to limit federal support to
    stem cell lines derived before 9 August 2001 (Science, 17
    August 2001, p. 1242). The 14-member internal panel
    (stemcelltaskforce.nih.gov) includes prominent stem cell
    researchers Ronald McKay and Mahendra Rao. It also
    receives advice from working groups of extramural grantees
    that include top researchers such as James Thomson of the
    University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Irving Weissman of
    Stanford University.

    Science visited Battey at NIH last month during the area's
    seemingly endless winter to see how he's holding up.
    Blue-eyed and athletic, he looked as though he had just
    breezed into the office after a morning of snowshoeing. He
    was railing against the cumbersome and--he believes--
    ineffectual code orange security precautions at NIH in a tone
    that suggested a low tolerance for bureaucratic niceties.
    "Someone could drive a truck over a curb" or come in on the
    weekend without being hassled, he scoffed.

    The first priority for the task force, Battey explains, is to beef
    up the number of researchers trained to work with human
    embryonic stem (ES) cells. "There are probably no more than
    30 to 40 principal investigators," he says. "I could see the field
    growing five- to 10-fold over the next 5 years." To prime the
    pump, NIH is offering training funds to established
    investigators, short-term training courses for novices, and
    "administrative supplements" for researchers to add ES cells to
    their portfolio.

    ..

    The next big step is to characterize the available cell lines.
    (Last November, Battey reduced the number of approved cell
    lines listed on the NIH registry from 74 to nine after weeding
    out those not available for proprietary reasons or because they
    hadn't yet been cultured.) Battey says he plans to advertise this
    spring for two researchers and two technicians to analyze the
    lines that are actually available to researchers. McKay, who
    will oversee the effort, says the aim is to provide "an
    information resource" for scientists seeking the best methods
    of cultivating particular cell lines. He says he has obtained six
    cell lines so far and expects to have 10 by the end of the year
    as more approved lines become available.

    Another adviser to the task force, Leonard Zon of Children's
    Hospital in Boston, applauds this move, saying that
    "characterization of the lines as they currently stand is insufficient"
    for choosing which line to pick for a given experiment. "You don't
    even know which lines are genetically stable." Adds Battey, "It's
    been assumed that cell populations grown from the same
    blastocyst are similar if not identical." But detailed gene analysis
    might show them to be "very different."

    Characterization won't solve a deeper problem: There may be
    too few cell lines to satisfy NIH-funded researchers. Many
    would agree with Gordon Keller of Mount Sinai School of
    Medicine in New York City, another working group member,
    who thinks "additional lines will be necessary in the not-too-
    distant future" to provide greater genetic variation. Battey
    disagrees. "We need several years of research before we even
    need to think about more lines," he says.

    In the meantime, he sees NIH's "infrastructure" grants for
    ramping up stem cell production--eight groups in the United States
    and abroad have been funded to date--as a way to stimulate the
    field. He admits that some may take a while to bear fruit since
    using some lines that are currently frozen (including those at the
    Karolinska Institute in Sweden) may await new cultivation
    techniques.

    Battey also takes a more optimistic stance than his
    nongovernmental colleagues on the potential effects of a ban on
    research cloning, should the Senate follow the House's lead.
    Research on diseases won't be severely hurt if the government
    blocks human cloning technology, he says: "I think we are many,
    many years away from having the knowledge we need to make
    such [alarmist] statements." Battey argues that the most
    important good from human embryo cloning would be
    knowledge of how to reprogram a cell's nucleus--and "those
    kinds of lessons can most easily be learned in animal models."

    Despite their differing views, observers seem to feel that Battey
    is the man for the job. NIH and the task force are "doing as well
    as they can within the constraints," says Keller. According to
    Zon, "What was needed was to have someone take charge and
    make sure stem cells were available to researchers." By doing
    that, he says, Battey's task force is serving the community well. "
    ---------



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