Church and State blog: State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention

Monday, November 03, 2008

State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention

This morning at 5.00am, as we were getting ready to leave the place we sleep in at night - since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps (prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch) - we nearly got drenched: one moment I am tying my shoelaces on one of the steps and the next water is pouring down by my side from a hose, all our bags still about the place. This is actually the second time a cleaner has come out on us with a hose (see blog of 19 October “United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue”).

We find it a bit odd, especially since communications started out cordial between us and employees: we were visited by an employee within days, and on three occasions we have been given food. Also, according to the website of the company that owns the building, they are well respected and not only fund raise for science education (Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells has been signed by 571 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates), but run a project for the homeless.

We will seek to lodge a complaint with the City of London Police should this situation get out of hand. Of course, there is always the option of soaking our shelter for the night to ensure we can’t bed down. In this instance, we have yet to decide if we will sleep anywhere nearby for the night and, should the police insist we move on, I take the arrest as I did on 11 September (see blog “I am arrested for breach of the peace”). As I stated in the blog of 13 September “Letter from the City of London Police”, I am well prepared to have the legality of such an arrest tested under the Human Rights Act 1998, and even on appeal, if necessary.

Tomorrow, Michigan voters will decide on Proposition 2, a constitutional amendment that would allow narrowly defined research on human embryos that are leftover after fertility treatment and that would otherwise be discarded if not donated by patients for stem cell research. “Michigan has one of the most restrictive laws in the country with respect to embryonic stem cell research: it is legal for patients to discard human embryos but not legal for scientists to perform research on these discarded embryos even if that is what the patients want,” write University of Michigan’s Liz Barry and Sean Morrison in Science Progress. “This law delays medical research without saving a single embryo from destruction,” they add. (Liz Barry is the Managing Director of the Life Sciences Institute of the University of Michigan and Sean Morrison is the Director of the University's Center for Stem Cell Biology.)

Only four states have laws as restrictive as Michigan: Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Louisiana. “Both presidential candidates and a majority of members of Congress have affirmed their support for loosened restrictions on embryonic stem cell research,” Barry and Morrison write. “The loosening of federal funding restrictions will provide a boost to stem cell research nationwide, but will increase the gulf between scientists in Michigan as compared to those in other states. Unlike scientists at other major research universities, scientists in Michigan universities will remain unable to derive new embryonic stem cell lines for use in expanded federal funding. So is the Michigan vote consequential for national public policy on stem cell research?”

The answer is yes. “A peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States,” they write. “The National Institutes of Health invest over $28 billion each year, 80 percent of which is awarded in peer-reviewed competitive grants to researchers across the nation ... Under this system, the United States has become the global leader in biomedical research. Key to our success has been choosing the best research to fund based a nationwide competition, judged by scientists themselves rather than politicians or lobbyists. American science succeeds because it is a meritocracy, rewarding achievement and ability over more provincial concerns.

“This winning approach is thwarted by the patchwork of conflicting state laws and policies regarding human embryonic stem cell research. Forty-five minutes south of Ann Arbor, Michigan, scientists in Toledo, Ohio, are free to use human embryos in research and to derive new stem cell lines. Are the values of Ohio residents so different from the values of Michigan residents (other than in football)? Across the country in California, the state just awarded over $59 million to support the stem cell research of California scientists and has committed a total of $3 billion overall. Massachusetts is investing $1 billion in a similar program, and New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Illinois have also pledged millions of dollars in funding. Yet scientists in Michigan would go to jail for doing the work for which scientists in these states are receiving millions of dollars in state funding.”

According to Barry and Morrison, diverse and separate state funding undercuts the successful system of choosing which research to fund based on nationwide competition and peer review. “California scientists are only competing with other California scientists for the funds available there and Illinois scientists will only compete with other Illinois scientists,” they write. “Scientists in other states, who may sometimes have greater expertise, will not have the opportunity to help solve the important problems targeted by these states for funding. This fractured system is antithetical to the goal of funding the most meritorious research and to engaging all of our resources in the war against disease. Families affected by disease don’t care where the cure comes from. Yet under the current system, geography drives research investment and determines the problems and approaches that our scientists focus on.”

Barry and Morrison conclude: “Michigan is home to the University of Michigan, one of the world’s leading research universities. According to various measures of scientific impact, UM is one of the top universities in the world in the field of stem cell research. Yet that impact comes almost entirely from research in the area of adult stem cells. If the upcoming ballot initiative in Michigan fails, it will delay Michigan’s ability to develop in the area of pluripotent stem cell research and reinforce the idea that geography should trump merit or promise when the nation determines scientific priorities.”

Proposition 2 pits the state’s powerful public and private biological research centers against large, conservative Catholic and evangelical populations who equate destroying fertilized eggs with murder, said the Wall Street Journal. “I'd call it a religious-ethical friction,” Leonard Fleck, a medical ethicist at Michigan State University in Lansing, who favors the proposal, told the Journal. “It’s obviously related to the abortion issue. What gives it a different moral colouring, what we’d hope to accomplish with the embryonic stem cells, is the saving of human life.”

According to polls, Michigan voters are split down the middle. The proposal’s opponents, gathered as Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science and Experimentation, have raised more than $7 million in contributions – $5 million alone from the Michigan Catholic Conference – to defeat the initiative and keep the ban on the destruction of human embryos for medical research in place, according to the Journal. Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), will seek to make the case that such interventions at state level have led to very serious threats to the entire US biomedical research enterprise, replacing science with ideology, and replacing rational regulation with restrictions based on ideology that undercut “a peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research that has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States”.

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

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Monday, November 03, 2008

State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention

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