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