Re: [QUAD-L] Testimony on Stem Cells by Harold Varmus, M. D.

[Jim Lubin]

At 02:00 PM 10/13/2004, QuadPirate wrote:

 

Testimony on Stem Cells by Harold Varmus, M. D.
Director, National Institutes of Health
December 2, 1998

http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/t981202a.html

This is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth told to the Senate.

That seems to backup Bush's policy

How Are Pluripotent Stem Cells Produced?

There are several ways to produce human pluripotent stem cells. These methods have been developed over the past 17 years by researchers working with animals. The work you will hear about today builds on this important basic animal research.

As I mentioned earlier, one method of creating these pluripotent stem cells was described by Dr. Thomson and his coworkers. The techniques they used were initially developed using mice. Dr. Thomson first made stem cells from non-human primates. In the most recent work, they used inner cell mass cells from blastocyst stage human embryos that were created in the course of infertility treatment and donated by couples for research to derive stem cells. The researchers allowed cell division to continue in culture to the blastocyst stage and then removed the inner cell mass, which was cultured to derive pluripotent stem cells.

The Role of the Federal Government

Federal funds were not used in either of the experiments that you will hear about today. First, let me first address Dr. Thomson's work in which cells were derived from embryos created by in vitro fertilization but not used for infertility treatment. This work falls clearly within the Congressional ban on human embryo research. NIH could not, and did not, support Dr. Thomson's recent work developing this cell line.