While a group of Nobel laureates has urged President George W. Bush to support funding for research involving the controversial use of embryonic stem cells, the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep may have found a way to avoid using embryos in stem cell research.
When human embryonic stem cells were first isolated in late 1998 by two groups of researchers, the achievement was heralded for its potential to lead to treatment for a wide range of diseases and, possibly, the development of individual organs for transplantation. The use of such cells immediately generated controversy because the cells must be taken from human embryos.
On February 23, PPL Therapeutics, the Scotland-based cloners of Dolly, announced at a meeting of the British Fertility Society in London that it derived beating myocardial cells of cattle from skin cells. Although heart cells previously have been derived from stem cells, the new approach "is to 'revert' fully differentiated skin cells to stem cells first and then to transform these into a distinct population of cells of another type such as heart cells," PPL said in a statement. The work was carried out by a PPL subsidiary in Blacksburg, Virginia.
"In the long term, the findings have implications for the use of more ethically acceptable cell populations in the treatment of human disease," PPL said. One of PPL's next goals is to try to repeat the findings using human cells.
On February 22, the Washington Post reported that 80 Nobel laureates were among a larger group that wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to support federal funding for research using human embryonic stem cells. "The discovery of human pluripotent stem cells is a significant milestone in medical research. Federal support for the enormous creativity of the U.S. biomedical community is essential to translate this discovery into novel therapies for a range of serious and currently intractable diseases," the authors said.
During the Clinton administration, guidelines were developed under which federally funded scientists could conduct research using embryonic stem cells only if they had been isolated by privately funded researchers.
For Your Information:
PPL Therapeutics posts its statement at www.ppl-therapeutics.com/html/cfml/index_fullstory.cfm?StoryID=32.
The Washington Post's news story, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36617-2001Feb21.html, includes a link to the text of the letter.
- The National Institutes of Health posts a fact sheet on stem cell research, which was updated in January, at www.nih.gov/news/stemcell/stemfactsheet.htm.
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