Obama lifts ban on embryonic stem cell research

Yesterday, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to lift restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, overturning a Bush administration policy that patients and medical researchers said hindered the development of new medical treatments. Obama signed the order before a White House audience packed with scientists – the Chicago Sun-Times gives a list of participants and attendees.

“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama said. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute (GPI), said in a statement: “In order to provide certainty, the next step is to protect embryonic stem cell research by legislation. Building on the momentum, it’s time to repeal the Dickey-Wicker Amendment that serves as a blockade for funding research on work on embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization procedures to derive new cell lines or somatic cell nuclear transfer. All stem cell advocates applaud Congresswoman Diana DeGette who has expressed her intention to seek reversal of this fundamental funding restriction.”

The Associated Press reports that scientists are cheering Obama’s lifting of federal funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, hopeful the move will open the financial floodgates to speed new treatments. “It’s wonderful. We are elated,” said Jan Nolta, who directs the stem cell research program at the University of California at Davis. “Now that we can use the federal funds, it will just go so much more quickly.”

Michael West, chief executive of BioTime, said he expected to see increased demand for the hundreds of stem cell lines sold by his Emeryville-based company. More importantly to the industry, West said, private investors will be less afraid of putting their money into stem cell startups. Venture capitalists and big pharmaceutical companies in the past have been skittish about investing in stem cell companies out of fear that federal regulations could tighten even further, he said. “It’s a green light that will go a long way in my experience to people committing capital. Not knowing the future was really a major risk factor.”

Not everyone is excited though. The International Herald Tribune reports today that after Obama signed the order, the Vatican and US and Italian Church leaders condemned the move. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on pro-life activities, called Obama’s decision “a sad victory of politics over science and ethics”.

The Chicago Tribune and The Capital Times carry some quotes from well-known researchers, many of whom have signed Declan’s petition to the UN on somatic cell nuclear transfer, sometimes referred to as “therapeutic cloning” to distinguish it from reproductive cloning research. Below is a statement from James Thomson, professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is credited as the world’s first person ever to isolate an embryonic stem cell, first from a rhesus monkey in 1995 and then from a human in 1998. Prof Thomson is often acknowledged by his peers as “the founder of the field”. He said:

The executive action by President Obama lifting restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research is a welcome milestone for our field. The decision will help restore America as a leader in this field and is a clear path out of a policy thicket that has slowed the pace of discovery for eight years. It also removes a stigma that has discouraged many bright young people from embarking on careers in stem cell research. Research on embryonic stem cells remains critically important. We have many unanswered questions, and the only way to realize the full potential of embryonic stem cells and other types of stem cells is a level playing field and unfettered inquiry. Human-induced pluripotent stem cells - the transformed adult cells that seem to mimic the qualities of embryonic stem cells - would not have been possible without research on human embryonic stem cells. We are grateful to President Obama for the courage of his decision as well as for the broad bipartisan support our work has received in Washington.

Doctors transplant windpipe with stem cells

The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches. Given the termination of our Big Issue pitches (see blog of 11 November “Letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation Charity”), we are pretty much unable to keep our account in the local internet café (£3 for seven hours) going and are now restricted to the 3-hour maximum computer use per day at Idea Store Whitechapel library that our local council imposed on each of our membership cards on 1 February. I have had to adapt my blogs accordingly: the emphasis now is on the product of my research into the field of human embryonic stem (hES) cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) – conferences, news, reports, discoveries and applications, major research institutions throughout world, joint international efforts, bloggers, etc – so that as soon as I have a laptop I am in a position to build within two weeks a website for our campaign in support of hES cell research and SCNT.

Claudia Castillo received trachea grown from her own cells

British newspapers report this morning that surgeons replaced the damaged windpipe of Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old mother of two, with one created from bone marrow stem cells grown in a laboratory at Bristol University – Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning has had 11 signings from Bristol University, and would have a lot more if the vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics on his behalf were not going to spam boxes, or to cyberspace (see previous blog; on the subject: yesterday, after I posted the blog, I sent 163 emails to the United States, received two out-of office autoreplies, and not unsurprisingly no one signed – to date the petition has been signed by 583 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates).

Britain’s top stem cell expert, Professor Stephen Minger of King’s College London (an early signatory of Declan’s petition) told the Evening Standard that the cutting-edge collaboration, involving doctors from Spain, the UK and Italy, was hugely important for future disease treatments. As the first scientist in the UK to grow human embryonic stem cells, he said: “This is a lovely example of how basic stem cell biology continues to yield new, exciting and clinically important treatments. I commend this international research team for such a co-ordinated and successful treatment approach.”

Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, a former chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council (and another signatory of Declan’s petition), has a piece in today’s Times titled “An event that might really deserve to be called a breakthrough”. He writes that advances such as this trachea transplant “are the kind of encouragement that we need to have hope that stem cells and tissue engineering will eventually deliver the promised revolution in medical treatment”. Commenting on hES cell research, he writes: “At the much earliest steps on the ladder to treatment, researchers are now trying to grow entire organs – hearts, kidneys, pancreases – from embryonic stem cells, in test tube conditions. The capacity of embryonic stem cells to turn into virtually any other kind of cell obviously gives them the most potential for organ and tissue replacement. But there is much to learn about how to grow and control them and prevent them being rejected, before they are likely to be widely used.”

In the United States, the Wisconsin State Journal reports today that last week, President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team named a prominent University Wisconsin-Madison researcher - Alta Charo, a bioethicist and law professor who studies issues surrounding embryonic and other stem-cell research – to a panel reviewing federal health policy, including funding hES cell research. Obama has pledged to lift federal restrictions on the research. USA Today comments that Obama “could reignite an emotional national debate over the promise and the perils of medical research using cells taken from human embryos”. It adds: “The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is warning that Obama will alienate millions, and abortion opponents are bracing for a fight.”

Yesterday I had the time to google the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, an alliance of four San Diego research powerhouses: University of California, San Diego, The Burnham Institute, The Salk Institute and The Scripps Research Institute. The consortium renamed itself in September, after announcing a $30 million donation from South Dakota philanthropist T Denny Sanford. Sanford’s funding has been combined with a $43 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to build a four-story facility on North Torrey Pines Mesa for research in regenerative medicine. The new research center is expected to be open by 2010, with groundbreaking set to begin this January. The Consortium coordinated a one-day forum on 7 November at the Salk Institute which attracted several hundred biomedical researchers (Bruce Bigelow reported on the event on Xconomy and Science Network says that videos of the event will be available on its website soon).

Our sleeping pitch is soaked

As I reported in the previous blog, yesterday The Big Issue
Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – confirmed that our pitches have been terminated, after two years of us surviving on the streets of London by selling the magazine from the same registered pitches and despite Declan’s email letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see blog of 11 November “Letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation Charity”). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

Then last night we arrived at the place we sleep 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 – to find it had been hosed down with water (this is a first for us in over two years of sleeping rough). It has only been a few days since we found out that dim bulbs in the spotlights above us had been replaced with very powerful ones (see blog of 15 November “Our sleeping pitch is targeted”), and two weeks since we were at the other end of a cleaner with a hose as we were about to leave at 5.00am (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”). Anyway, equipped with a scrubbing brush and a shower curtain, we stayed put because the night we decided to sleep elsewhere, on 10 September, I was arrested for refusing to move on as a result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”).

A matter of particular concern to us is how many of the emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are actually getting through: we are under no illusion that the vast majority are being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). Yesterday, I only received seven out-of-office autoreplies from 226 emails. Hardly surprising we only got one signature (last week it was two signatories from 640 emails; three weeks ago, one signatory from 1,072 emails). Back in February I expressed concern that my emails were not getting through (see blog of 16 February “Declan’s petition to the UN is being brought to a halt”). In fact, on 29 February Declan emailed the Home Secretary, Jacqueline Smith, regarding interception of communications; the Home Office replied on 5 March denying that any such warrant was issued; and on 8 March the NAC website was suspended due to spam as reported via SpamCop (see blog of 14 March “SpamCop reports Declan as a spammer”).

Although the NAC website will not be uploaded again – as I announced in August, we are trying to raise the £450 we need to buy a laptop to build a website for an international campaign in support of human embryonic stem (hES) cell research and therapeutic cloning – this is a snag of what the “Recent News” page looked like before it was suspended (the NAC website was built long ago, around the beginning of 2005, and what was then termed “liberal reforms strongly rejected by the Vatican and the Christian Right” has become “the scientific perspective on public policy issues”):

Arthur Caplan: Obama election signals change in stem cell fight

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). Yesterday, I only received nine out-of-office autoreplies from 314 emails: for example, 80 emails to the European Network of Cancer Registries yielded three autoreplies; 43 to the University of California San Francisco, just two. From 138 emails I didn’t receive a single autoreply: 51 were sent to the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Center and 87 to the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Hardly surprising no one signed. In fact, this week I have sent a total of 640 emails, which have resulted in just one signature (two weeks ago, it took 1,072 emails for the same result). We really have little option in this situation other than to play the odds and get off as many emails as we can in the hope that a few get through - the petition has so far been signed by 580 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.

For the last two days a cleaner has been arriving at the place we sleep in at night at 4.00am, twenty minutes before we get up - 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). This morning this guy was outside the building as we were packing and, when he reappeared with a hose to fill his bucket, we wondered if we were in for at least the wetting we got on 3 November (see blog “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”). We are again keeping our fingers crossed for this weekend in the Catholic Manna Centre, where Declan was assaulted on 19 June (see blog “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”); and should this cleaner get out of hand on Monday morning we will seek to make a statement in the local police station, which should make for some interesting online writing.

Caplan speaking at a European Commission conference (Brussels) in 2004

We believe that the momentum is swinging behind Declan’s petition and what will be our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. In the US, the election of President-elect Barack Obama “signals a shift in the bioethics debate,” writes Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics of the University of Pennsylvania, in an MSNBC.com opinion piece. (Caplan is one of the world’s most quoted medical ethicists - and one of the first signatories of Declan’s petition.)

According to Caplan, last week’s US presidential election will be remembered for its impact on core bioethical topics that have long dominated American domestic politics, including embryonic stem cell research and abortion rights. Caplan writes that the failure of state ballot initiatives that aimed to restrict abortion rights signals that the abortion debate may be subsiding, while newer bioethical concerns that are likely to dominate American politics for years to come, including physician-assisted suicide, are emerging. In addition, he argues, the election of President-elect Obama has brought the fight over embryonic stem cell research in the US “to an end”, because Obama has pledged to lift federal restrictions on the research.

Caplan points out that the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2 – allowing research on embryos that were created for fertility treatments and would otherwise be discarded – means that 10 states now have laws permitting embryonic stem cell research. “These 10 are likely to be the recipients of an executive order that the new president will undoubtedly sign shortly after taking office, freeing up federal funds for embryonic stem cell research while laying out new regulatory guidelines,” Caplan writes. He adds: “Many, including myself, would argue that the ongoing debate over the morality of stem cell research is really just a stalking horse for the abortion debate.” And efforts to further restrict abortion did not fare well at the ballot box, with voters in South Dakota and California both rejecting efforts to restrict abortion rights, Caplan notes. In addition, a Colorado ballot measure that would have defined a fertilised egg as a person with constitutional rights failed by a measure of three to one.

“Taken all together, this series of votes represents an important moment in public bioethics in America,” Caplan writes. “Like it or not – and I am well aware that many are not ready to let go of these issues – the nation may be starting to move past the endless battles over stem cells, embryos and abortion.” He argues that embryonic stem cell research is advancing, embryos are not going to be given legal status as persons and further restrictions on abortion are unlikely. As these issues fade from the spotlight, how Americans die and treat painful medical conditions will emerge as the dominant bioethical debate (Caplan, MSNBC.com, 6/11).

Right to Life and the Michigan Catholic Conference – two longtime powerhouse cultural warriors in state politics – underwent a rugged and uncustomary Election Day, said The Detroit News. They watched a ballot proposal they had feverishly championed with millions of dollars go down to defeat. And many anti-abortion candidates fell to abortion-rights advocates.

“It was probably the worst night Right to Life has had in Michigan in a couple of decades,” Bill Ballenger, a former state senator and publisher of the Inside Michigan Politics newsletter, told The Detroit News. “And the Catholic Church hierarchy has to be embarrassed that the church spent $5 million in a failed effort to defeat a ballot proposal to ease embryonic stem cell research given all the other problems out there and the church’s social justice mission,” he said.

According to The Detroit News, neither the Catholic church nor Right to Life was willing to say they had suffered irreversible setbacks and said they still would be able to pursue an agenda that protects the dignity of life and other issues important to the church. One of the first things they want to look at is regulations for the stem cell issue, Proposal 2, which the church bitterly fought. Detroit News exit polling showed 56 percent of voters who identified themselves as Catholic supported Proposal 2 – overall the measure passed by a 53-47 margin. (Cain, Detroit News, 13/11).

One quote that I think particularly complements Caplan’s opinion piece comes from Marci Hamilton, the Paul R Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law. She opens her legal commentary in FindLaw, titled “The Five Religion-Related Issues that Should Most Concern the Future Obama Administration”, by writing: “With the election of Obama, there is finally some hope that the United States can turn to a more rational set of policies relating to religion.”

Stem cell research tops Obama agenda

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). On Monday I sent 198 emails - mainly to Scotland and California because in Sunday’s blog I referred to the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Edinburgh University and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine in San Diego – but only received ten out-of-office autoreplies, and not unsurprisingly just one signature. Yesterday I sent 128 emails, mainly to California, which yielded two autoreplies, and no signatures.

Also yesterday, The Big Issue Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – advised Declan that our pitches are in effect terminated (as soon as it has been confirmed by Office staff that we did not purchase a minimum of 40 magazines each week for the four weeks commenced 6 October, we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch), despite his complaint the previous day to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see previous blog). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

Then last night, as we were bedding down, just to add insult to injury, I suppose, two guys entertained themselves on their skateboards above us for some twenty minutes – 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). The last time some guys partied in the enclosure, on 9 September, we decided to sleep somewhere else the following night and I was arrested because I refused to be moved on as result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”). The road is described as a “quiet thoroughfare” by the company that owns the building. Oh, well.



Barely a week since his election victory, US President-elect Barack Obama is bringing joy to long-suffering stem cell researchers. For years, US progress has been crippled by restrictions introduced in August 2001 by President George W Bush, preventing federally funded researchers from working on all but a few sources of embryonic stem cells - the cells from embryos with huge medical potential for repairing organs and tissues. Now, those restrictions will be among the first of Bush’s executive orders to be swept away, probably within the next 100 days, said New Scientist. The news emerged on Sunday from an interview on Fox News featuring John Podesta, the head of Obama’s “transition team”, which is managing the switch to power.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. According to New Scientist, the aim is to quickly dismantle the legacies of the Bush era that Obama sees as holding back progress, particularly those motivated by ideology or religion. Bush’s resistance to stem cell research, for example, is a concession to evangelical conservatives who oppose all research on embryos. “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country,” said Podesta.

The news was greeted with delight by researchers who have long criticised the Bush restrictions. “Hallelujah - at last,” Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts (and a signatory of Declan’s petition), told New Scientist. He added: “This represents the end of a sad chapter in American scientific history. Under an Obama administration, money will hopefully flow to all promising avenues of research based on scientific merit, and not skewed to fit a conservative agenda. We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back” (Coghlan, New Scientist, 12/11).

The Union-Tribune quotes Joe Panetta, executive director of San Diego’s Biocom, an association representing the local biotech industry. “I’m feeling very positive about some of the things we’ve seen and heard about Obama’s plans to increase funding for basic research,” Panetta said. He added that a number of local biotech firms depend on federal funds for research, largely distributed through the National Institutes of Health. Federal support of stem cell research would also aid the Burnham, Scripps and Salk research institutes (of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine). Although California has enacted its own $3 billion stem cell research program, under current federal regulations, embryonic research must be conducted separately from federally funded research. “That’s an incredible nightmare in logistics and operations,” Panetta said. “It would be great to see the rules loosening” (Calbreath, The Union-Tribune, 9/11).

According to Reuters, a reversal of President Bush’s long-standing policy would give a boost to companies seeking to develop therapies based on stem cell research. Several stem cell focused companies reported positive developments on Monday. Geron Corp said its potential HIV treatment, TAT2, had promising preclinical data, while biotech giant Celgene Corp got a regulatory nod to go ahead with human trials of its experimental stem cell therapy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. “We will see more and more of these events just given the fact that there is more and more path for the commercialisation of stem cells – adult, placental, umbilical and now, more embryonic,” WBB Securities analyst Steve Brozak said. Shares of Geron were up as much as 16 percent, while StemCells’ shares soared 42 percent. Both stocks have risen significantly over the last one month. Other smaller players in the field also benefited (Dey, Reuters, 10/11).

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, who acts as the Vatican health minister, said that stem cells taken from human embryos and involving the destruction of the embryos “serve no purpose”, reports The Times yesterday under the headline “Vatican fires off warning to Barack Obama over stem cell research”. Asked whether the Vatican was concerned about reports that Mr Obama might reverse the Bush Administration’s ban, the cardinal said that embryonic stem cell research had not resulted in any significant health cure so far and was “good for nothing”. Research on adult stem cells and umbilical cords had been shown to have “positive value”, by contrast, although even that was not “a panacea for everything”. He said the Vatican would seek clarification of the new administration’s position on stem cells, and he himself was not “fully aware” what it was (Owen, The Times, 11/11).

Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, is vital to advancing regenerative medicine. According to a 2006 US Department of Health & Human Services report, a conservative estimate of the worldwide market for regenerative medicine by 2010 is $500 billion (the projected US market is $100 billion). We will also argue that advancements in hES cell research have the potential to be an economic boon for countries throughout the world and to lower overall domestic health care costs, which in the US alone are in excess of $2 trillion annually (16 percent of US Gross Domestic Product). With reference to the United States, we will further argue that ill-considered interventions at a state level that replace rational regulation with restrictions based on ideology undercut a peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research that has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”).

In fact, we believe that NAC will be in a position to be a leading Vatican watchdog regarding ES cell research and SCNT. We are well aware of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), for example, which has a permanent Secretariat in Brussels. The COMECE secretariat monitors and analyses current developments in research policy, biotechnology and bioethics at the European Union level, according to its website.

Scientists Urge President-Elect Obama to Restore US Funding of Stem Cell Research

2008 World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, WI, 22-23 September

Advocates of stem cell research are counting the days until the swearing-in of President-elect Barack Obama, reports the Los Angeles Times. Although President George Bush has strictly limited stem cell research from cell lines derived from human embryos, Obama has long favoured such research and is likely to put a quick end to the federal ban that limits funding of research. Obama has pledged full support of stem cell research, stating recently:

I strongly support expanding research on stem cells. I believe the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations.

As president, I will lift the current administration’s ban on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines … and I will ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight.

The Vancouver Sun reported on Thursday that researchers attending a stem cell conference in Canada were elated with Obama’s win. Clayton Smith, an American researcher who moved to British Columbia five years ago to perform stem cell research, and now heads a lab at the BC Cancer Agency’s Terry Fox Laboratory, told the Sun: “Watching the election last night was a singular event, like watching the Berlin Wall fall.” USA Today reported that people attending the annual fundraiser benefiting the Michael J Fox Foundation in New York Wednesday night were giddy over Obama’s win. “In all fairness, Sen McCain has been supportive of our foundation in the past and supportive of research. But I think this administration will really embrace it,” said Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease. Researchers are hopeful that stem cell research could eventually yield a successful treatment for the disease.

In a press release issued on Thursday the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which represents the world’s leading stem cell scientists, has urged Obama to restore federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in the first 100 days of his presidency. “On August 9, 2001, President Bush declared an executive order banning funding for certain kinds of stem cell research on ideological and religious grounds, not on the basis of the promise of such research for advancing medical knowledge and therapies,” ISSCR President-elect Irving Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (and a signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning), is quoted as saying in the press release. He added: “This was a dangerous precedent of politicisation of biomedical research, perhaps the first ideological ban of a type of research in America. We urge President-Elect Obama to return to the former policy of investigator-initiated research in all areas of stem cell biology and medicine, overseen by the kinds of safeguards we have advocated in the ISSCR’s Guidelines for the Conduct of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.”

According to the Wisconsin Technology Network, to reverse the President Bush’s stem cell policy, which he has pledged to do, Obama does not need an act of Congress or to have his aides prepare an executive order for his signature. He only needs to give a simple order to the director of the National Institutes of Health. Alta Charo, a Warren P Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, indicated to WTN News that it would be very simple for President Obama to make federal funding available to more embryonic stem cell lines. “Bush’s policy was just that, a policy; that is, a direction given to his NIH director,” Charo wrote in an email. “So Obama can simply direct his NIH director to feel free to fund research on newer lines. No executive order or Congressional action needed.” Charo noted that the only time Congressional action would be needed is if the new President wanted to change the legislative prohibition on using federal funds to work directly on embryos (eg to derive new lines). That’s a reference to the so-called Dickey-Wicker Amendment, said WTN.

Reporting on Friday’s annual stem cell conference at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, the North County Times said that stem cell researchers expect a surge of funding, an easing of restrictions and accelerating scientific progress in turning stem cells into disease treatments. The “Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa” was presented by the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, an alliance of four San Diego research powerhouses: UC San Diego, The Burnham Institute, The Salk Institute and The Scripps Research Institute. Philanthropist T Denny Sanford, after whom the consortium is named, was attending the conference. In September, he gave the consortium $30 million to advance stem cell research. Sanford was optimistic about the prospects for stem cell research, which he called “the medicine of the future”, and the incoming Obama administration’s support of it. “Everything that I’ve heard thus far is that Obama certainly is behind stem cell research, he’ll lift the restrictions currently in place [on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research], so it adds that much more excitement to the field,” Sanford said in an interview before the conference began. (Several distinguished scientists from the Sanford Consortium have signed Declan’s petition.)

The Harvard Crimson quotes Brock Reeve, the executive director of The Harvard Stem Cell Institute (and another signatory of Declan’s petition) as saying: “I think it’s a great moment for the country because one of the things that Obama is doing is placing a greater emphasis on science and relying on different experts in different fields. He’s definitely making science and investment in general a much higher priority.”

According to a report by the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council of Michigan, it is regenerative medicine that is driving the life sciences business sector in Michigan, the United States, and the rest of the world. The report says: “Stem cell research, including human embryonic stem cell research, is seen by many as vital to advancing regenerative medicine. According to a 2006 US Department of Health & Human Services report, a conservative estimate of the worldwide market for regenerative medicine by 2010 is $500 billion. The projected US market is $100 billion.”

Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem cell research, is not only vital to advancing regenerative medicine, but has the potential to be an economic boon for countries throughout the world and to lower overall domestic health care costs (see blog of 1 November “Can a cell have a soul?”). And we will voice strong support for researchers and research institutes doing breakthrough work - such as, for example, the Japanese scientists from the Riken Center for Developmental Biology who announced on Thursday that they have been successful in creating a cerebral cortex from embryonic stem cells, thus boosting the possibility of future treatment of brain-related diseases; and the Scottish scientists from the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Edinburgh University who have been turning embryonic stem cells into a cell type lost in Parkinson’s patients. We will also report on joint international efforts on embryonic stem cell research and applications.

Herbert Hauptman on Science and Religion

Yesterday Declan wrote once again to the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, following serious verbal abuse by a homeless woman in the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre, which belongs to his diocese (see previous blog). We should be almost invisible to other homeless who attend the centre since we are middle-aged, keep to ourselves and are in and out of the place as quickly as possible. Yet, since 10 April, Declan has been forced to wash in the street as a result of harassment and intimidation from other homeless – all our money and documents were also robbed in centre (see blog of 20 June “Declan robbed in the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre”). And on Monday at 5.00am, as we were about to leave the place we sleep in at night, a cleaner hosed where we bed down (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”). So we are very much keeping our fingers crossed for this weekend in the Catholic Manna Centre, where Declan was assaulted on 19 June (see blog “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”).

Evangelicals fear the loss of their teenagers.

Two articles were written almost on the same day last week regarding religious fundamentalism in the United States: a review in The Buffalo News of Nobel Laureate Herbert Hauptman’s memoir “On the Beauty of Science”, and an article in The Times by best selling American author Susan Jacoby titled “Religion remains fundamental to US politics”. The articles especially complement previous blogs on Michigan’s Proposal 2, the amendment to the Michigan Constitution that was approved by Michigan voters in Tuesday’s general election, allowing people to donate embryos left over from fertility treatments for scientific research. The proposal pitted the state’s powerful public and private biological research centers against large, conservative Catholic and evangelical populations who equate destroying fertilised eggs with murder. According to The Wall Street Journal, the proposal’s opponents, gathered as Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science and Experimentation, 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.

Described by the Buffalo News as a “living treasure”, 91-year-old Herbert Hauptman won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1985 for his groundbreaking work in X-ray crystallography, research that helped pave the way in the development of powerful drugs. “On the Beauty of Science” is a sure-to-be-controversial call to arms, said the Buffalo News, as Hauptman argues forcefully that science and religion are incompatible and that Americans must learn to think more critically about science and other issues. Hauptman writes in the memoir: “I believe there is a direct negative connection between belief in religion, especially fundamentalist religion, and public scientific illiteracy.”

The Buffalo News reports that Hauptman believes his country would be better served if people studied more physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. Critical thinking, the kind fostered by a closer study of the sciences, is in short supply in the United States these days, he argues. He laments what he considers the mistaken priorities of the Bush administration, which he faults for cutting spending at the National Institutes of Health while spending billions in Iraq. “This is why it is so important for the general public to have a better understanding of where science is headed, or could be headed with the right funding,” Hauptman writes. It’s not just a matter of too little knowledge of science, he argues. The problem is compounded by too much belief in religion, ghosts, angels and alternative medicine, to boot.

“I believe that from an early age, most children in our society are inculcated in superstition and mumbo-jumbo, and so there is no development of the scientific approach to looking at the world,” Hauptman writes. He also tries to figure out why people are religious, and he wonders if human beings have a predisposition to be religious. He contends that the fact that the universe is orderly doesn’t provide evidence for God’s existence. He goes further to argue that science has done far more for humanity than religion, pointing to the development of air travel, computers and modern medicine as examples. Religion, he contends, has prompted too many people to act cruelly and murderously, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks. Hauptman also holds that science is more beautiful than religion, though many people don’t know enough about science and math to truly appreciate the beauty of, say, Gauss’ theorem (Watson, The Buffalo News, 2/11).

Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”, begins her article in The Times by writing that to most of her European friends, an inexplicable aspect of American culture is “the quixotic persistence and social influence of religious fundamentalism”. She adds: “They cannot understand how Americans could seriously consider for the second highest office in the land a candidate who has worshipped all her adult life at churches where congregants believe the literal truth of every word in the Bible and practise ‘speaking in tongues’.” According to opinion polls, Jacoby writes, about one third of Americans subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible – from “the chatty serpent” in the Garden of Eden to “the bloody prophecies in Revelation”. They constitute a large and disciplined minority – a primarily Protestant army of Christian soldiers, with a pre-Enlightenment mindset and disdain for secular values.

Like Hauptman, Jacoby argues that there is a powerful correlation between fundamentalism and lack of education. This year, Jacoby writes, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 45 percent of Americans with no education beyond high school adhere to biblical literalism, while only 29 percent with some university education – and 19 percent of university graduates – share that old-time faith. She adds that Republicans have tapped into the fundamentalist resentment of educated, sceptical elites to form the party’s right-wing Christian base.

Another important dimension, Jacoby contends, is their strange – in view of the history of Protestant anti-Catholicism before John F Kennedy’s election in 1960 – alliance with the most conservative elements within the Roman Catholic Church. “On issues such as abortion and gay marriage, the Catholic hierarchy (as distinct from the Catholic laity, which is much more liberal) and right-wing Protestants are the best of friends,” she writes. “Fundamentalists represent a black-and-white value system. Because their beliefs matter so much more to them than religious indifference does to the religiously indifferent, they exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Whether that influence will continue depends partly on the election results and partly on whether the alliance between right-wing Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants endures” (Jacoby, The Times, 31/10).

Well, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in their election analysis, state the following: “After eight years of unprecedented access to the White House and (until 2006) in the halls of Congress, Religious Right organizations are about to lose a lot of clout with much of official Washington and could see their influence at the national level diminished. But it’s unlikely any of these organizations will close down. Rather, they will organize to defeat individual-freedom initiatives put forward by President Barack Obama, and they will place more emphasis on state and local governments as a way to press their agenda forward.” (I also found a similar analysis by Religion Dispatches.)

The University of Michigan Welcomes Passage of Proposal 2

Early yesterday morning, as Declan began selling The Big Issue - a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches - a homeless begged alongside him; provocatively, I might add, like he wanted Declan to say something to him. After Declan left him to the pitch, we were not sure if the incident would prove the highlight of the day: Declan walks a round trip of two hours to the Catholic Manna Centre every weekday to be guaranteed a bite to eat for lunch, where he was assaulted on 19 June (see blog of 19 June “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”); and only the day before yesterday at 5.00am, as were about to leave the place we sleep in at night, a cleaner hosed where we bed down (see previous blog).

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells end up in spam boxes (or in cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”), so it doesn’t really count as a highlight. Still, the number of out-of-office autoreplies I received yesterday afternoon was amongst the lowest I have received in months: four from a total of 264 emails. For example, 86 emails to University College London Neuroscience yielded one autoreply; 60 to the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, one - the first email; and 78 to the School of Medicine of University of Southern California, two. (On Monday, it was eight autoreplies from 109 emails to University College London Neuroscience and 118 emails to the School of Medicine of University of Southern California; and two signatures.)

University of Michigan executive officers and faculty issued statements this morning regarding the passage of Proposal 2, the amendment to the Michigan Constitution that allows new embryonic stem cell lines to be derived from embryos that have been created for fertility treatment purposes. The embryos affected by the amendment would otherwise be discarded, unless donated with informed consent.

Proposal 2, approved by voters in yesterday’s general election, overturns a 1978 Michigan law that prohibited creation of new stem cell lines from discarded embryos – the vote was 2,143,101 in favor to 1,945,035 against. Prior to passage of Proposal 2, Michigan has been one of the most restrictive states in the country with respect to embryonic stem cell research.

The proposal pitted the state’s powerful public and private biological research centers against large, conservative Catholic and evangelical populations who equated destroying fertilised eggs with murder (see previous blog). “This is a great night for the state of Michigan,” said Sean Morrison, director of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology and a vocal supporter of the proposal. “Clearly the voters saw through the misinformation and fear that the opposition were spreading.

“I can tell you this: We’ll be meeting within the next week ... to expand our embryonic research program. We expect in the short-term millions of new dollars of grants to come from the federal government and private foundations to support the expanded research.”

Proposal 2’s strongest support came from college graduates and people who have done postgraduate work. High school graduates and dropouts were inclined to oppose it, said The Associated Press.

Elsewhere, voters in Colorado rejected a measure defining a person to “include any human being from the moment of fertilization”, which would have applied to sections of the Colorado Constitution that protect “natural and essential rights of persons”, said CNN.

Although, like most people, we expected Democratic candidate Barack Obama to win the general election, we were nonetheless quite pessimistic about Proposal 2 – according to pre-election polls, Michigan voters were split down the middle. All in all, it was a great night for Declan’s petition to the UN and our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

For the record, below is Declan’s email letter yesterday afternoon to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation, Steven Round. The Big Issue has informed us that from this coming Monday we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch, after almost two years surviving on the streets of London by selling the magazine from the same registered pitches; an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging, an illegal activity in England. In a reply email yesterday evening, Round informed Declan that he would make sure we receive a response.

Subject: The Big Issue

Dear Mr Round

I am writing to you in your capacity as chair of The Big Issue Foundation. Please find below a copy of my email letter of 7 October to the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue, Mr John Bird MBE, to which I have not received a reply. As a seller of The Big Issue magazine, I wish to complain that if my wife and I have not purchased a minimum of 40 magazines each week for four weeks commenced 6 October, from 10 November we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch - we “will be allowed to carry on selling but not have priority on any pitch”.

I can confirm that on 13, 14, 15 and 16 October I emailed The Big Issue with respect to my wife's new badge (1170), which, being unavailable for collection at Head Office on Monday, 13 October, did not become available for her to pick up until 1.00pm on Thursday, 16 October. The same Monday at Head Office - following my own rebadging to the end of February 2009 and the validation of our pitch authorisation slips until the end of Tuesday of the following week - I was advised by Office staff that my wife could not purchase or sell The Big Issue without her new badge.

I can also confirm that the first two working weeks of October culminated in the so-called "Black Friday" financial crash; shares around the world have continued their downward trend, particularly in London; and our pitches are located in the heart of London's financial district. Further, last week temperatures plummeted – the first time London has seen snow in October for 70 years.

Please would you acknowledge receipt.

Yours sincerely
Declan Heavey
Badge no. 1163

---------------------------

Subject: The Big Issue

Dear Mr Bird

As the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue, please find enclosed copy of an email I received yesterday, 6 October, from your Outreach Manager for London, Mr Paul Joseph. On 10 September 2007 you wrote to me, stating:

I have employed many people over the years to do jobs related to the running of The Big Issue. I have never employed them to do my job; likewise I do not do their job. Please bear this in mind when you are composing your letters. You do not need to address your letters to me, as it is not my job. I would only get involved if you were utterly and totally let down by those whose job it is in The Big Issue. I hope this assists in your deliberations in pursuit of your claims.

I wish to complain that if my wife and I do not purchase a minimum of 40 magazines each week for the next four weeks, from 10 November we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch - we "will be allowed to carry on selling but not have priority on any pitch".

Yesterday we were only able to afford to buy two Big Issues for resale, and today will only be able to afford to buy another two magazines. Moreover, I wrote to the Registrar of the European Court of Human Rights on 21 August further to my second application for priority under Rule 41 of the Rules of Court, stating:

As explained in previous applications, my wife and I survive on the streets of London by selling The Big Issue, a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches, and I have lodged numerous written complaints with The Big Issue Head Office in respect of my wife and myself being walked off our respective pitch by other street traders, including, inter alia, Big Issue vendors. You will note from my email and attachments to Court of 16 August that not only may my wife be forced into begging (a criminal offence in England), but she has been threatened by The Big Issue with debadging for so doing.

Please would you acknowledge receipt.

Yours sincerely
Declan Heavey
Badge no. 1163

cc Mr Steven Round, Chair of The Big Issue Foundation

Bernard Siegel: The new US President must heed calls for stem cell research

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). In fact, from all the emails I sent on Friday, Sunday and yesterday – 532 in total (115, 132 and 285 respectively) – no one has signed; if I include Thursday, it is one signatory from 692 emails. I always get an exceedingly low number of out-of-office autoreplies: yesterday, for example, I got seven autoreplies – 158 to the US Medical Schools Microbiology and Immunology Chairs yielded two, from 2nd and 74th emails; and 77 to Newcastle University's School of Biology and School of Chemistry yielded zero.

There are two other reasons why it is not credible that no scientist or academic would sign Declan’s petition: within two weeks Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is likely to be elected President of the United States (he will be lifting the funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research imposed by President George W Bush), and the United Nations is set to revisit the issue of therapeutic cloning next week (see blog of 19 October “United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue”); not to mention that the petition has been signed by 564 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.



An article in the Public Service Review by Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute, examines some of the obstacles regarding hESC research that will remain beyond 20 January 2009 – the day when Barack Obama or Republican presidential candidate John McCain will be inaugurated. Although scientists worry that McCain’s campaign statements have become progressively less supportive of hESC research, it is “widely expected that the new President will support the lifting of the arbitrary funding restrictions imposed by George W Bush on the National Institute of Health (NIH) funding embryonic stem cell research,” says Siegel.

President Bush restricted federal funding to only those embryonic stem cell lines, approximately 21 in number, in existence on 9th August 2001, the date he announced his policy, his rationale being, according to Siegel, that funding on embryonic stem cell lines created after that date “would somehow make the government complicit in the future destruction of human life”. Since 2001, NIH has funded approximately $3bn for adult stem cell research, says Siegel, while a relatively paltry $160m (estimated) has gone into researching the approved ‘presidential’ lines. Those lines, he adds, have been supplanted by hundreds of more recently derived lines better suited for research and most free of animal proteins. These new lines remain off limits to US researchers and their laboratories utilising NIH funding grants for their research.

“Historically, the America's policy debates, the so-called ‘stem cell wars’, parallels the rise of the social-conservative tide that placed George W Bush in power,” writes Siegel. “The opposition sought to elevate the legal standing of tiny, microscopic clumps of frozen cells, in effect, dragging embryonic stem cells and medical science into the forefront of the intractable abortion debate in America. The leadership of the ‘right to life’ movement, comprised of fundamentalist evangelical Christians and Catholics, strategised that they could undermine support for abortion rights if they could convince the public that blastocysts in a petri dish are equal to living, breathing persons.

“Many social-conservative think-tanks created specific bioethics agendas opposed to embryonic stem cell research. Organisations such as the American Enterprise Institute, Family Research Council and Discovery Institute, with combined budgets of millions of dollars, are the architects of endless legal gambits. They are authors of the media ‘talking points’ used by the social conservative politicos and allied cable news pundits. All are geared towards delay and obfuscation, not illumination.”

A new American president will not dissolve opposition. “Expect the foes of the research to continue to seek restrictions through lawsuits, delaying actions and state by state fights,” warns Siegel. “Each year, hundreds of bills are filed in almost every state seeking to elevate the status of in vitro blastocysts, defining ‘personhood’ as beginning at conception, thus raising the prospect of halting access to surplus embryos donated by their progenitors for medical research. The opposition seemingly prefer that embryos remain perpetually frozen or be discarded as medical waste, rather than used in potentially life-saving research.

“Beyond January 2009, many obstacles will remain. Without broad public support and impetus, there is concern that regulatory approval for the first embryonic stem cell clinical trials might be unreasonably delayed. Funding restrictions might be lifted through executive order or legislation, but will the money be there to advance the research? The NIH budget remains stagnant. With inflationary pressures on the economy, the [consumer] movement remains mobilised to make sure stem cells are a priority.”

Siegel concludes: “Globally, the advent of US federal funding for hESCR will galvanise the field in new ways. The political climate in the United States will certainly change for the better. But the consumer movement must be vigilant, lest the determined foes devise new strategies and tactics to delay the promise and hope for cures.”

European Court of Human Rights declares application inadmissible

This morning the Dellow Centre handed Declan a letter from the European Court of Human Rights dated 14 October, which states that on 7 October the Court decided to declare the application in the case of Heavey v the United Kingdom “inadmissible” because it did not comply with the requirements set out in Article 34 and 35 of the Convention. “In the light of all the material and its possession, and in so far as the matters complained of were within its competence, the Court found that they did not disclose any appearance of a violation of the rights and freedoms set out in the Convention or its Protocols,” it states (the letter is presented below).

The primary material to which the Court refers has been published in the following blogs: application of 8 September 2007 here; first request for priority of 8 September here; second request for priority of 4 July here. The Court first wrote to Declan on 22 November 2007 stating that it was “unnecessary” to consider his request for priority because it would be examining his application “shortly, possibly by the end of January 2008”; seven months later, in a letter dated 16 June (see here), it became “as soon as practicable”. We didn’t in fact expect to hear from the Court until well into the New Year. Anyway, with the likely election within two weeks of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States (he will be lifting the funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research imposed by President George W Bush), and with the United Nations set to revisit the cloning issue next week (see previous blog), we believe that the momentum is swinging behind Declan's petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells and what will be our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.

Prior to today we were not in a position to entertain the thought of signing on for benefits because Declan would have had to withdraw his application to the European Court – the Department of Work and Pensions terminated our benefits on 27 September 2006 because Declan did not ‘sign on’ two days before he was due to do so on 29 September. However, even now, signing on for benefits remains a non-option: there is clearly no remedy available to a claimant once the Department of Work and Pensions decides to terminate benefits. So we have no choice but to keep working as hard as we can to raise the £450 we need to buy a laptop for the campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning that will eventually take us off the streets (see blog of 26 August “Fighting for the Right to Clone”).

This is the letter from the Court:

Application no. 22541/07
Heavey v. the United Kingdom

Dear Sir,

I write to inform you that on 7 October 2008 the European Court of Human Rights, sitting as a Committee of three judges (G. Bonello, President, David Thor Björgvinsson and J. Šikuta) pursuant to Article 27 of the Convention, decided under Article 28 of the Convention to declare the above application inadmissible because it did not comply with the requirements set out in Article 34 and 35 of the Convention.

In the light of all the material and its possession, and in so far as the matters complained of were within its competence, the Court found that they did not disclose any appearance of a violation of the rights and freedoms set out in the Convention or its Protocols.

This decision is final and not subject to any appeal to either the Court, including its Grand Chamber, or any other body. You will therefore appreciate that the Registry will be unable to provide any further details about the Committee’s deliberations or to conduct further correspondence relating to its decision in this case. You will receive no further documents from the Court concerning this case and, in accordance with the Court’s instructions, the file will be destroyed one year after the date of the decision.

The present communication is made pursuant to Rule 53 § 2 of the Rules of Court.

Yours faithfully,
For the Committee

Fatoş Aracı
Deputy Section Registrar

The fate of Roe v Wade

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). In fact, yesterday I sent a larger number of emails in one day than in previous weeks – 281 – but received only two out-of-office autoreplies: from the 182nd and 187th emails. I was quite surprised to discover this morning that three scientists had signed, the second largest number of signatories we have had in one day since 18 March. Oh, and Declan has not even received an email of acknowledgement from the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue (a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches) in respect of his complaint that from 10 November we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch (see previous blog).

Supreme Court of the United States

With major implications for human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, the fate of Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court case that legalised abortion, has become a well-publicised issue of concern in this year’s presidential election between abortion-rights opponent Republican nominee John McCain and abortion-rights supporter Democratic nominee Barack Obama. According to the Los Angeles Times, possible retirements of several Supreme Court justices could affect whether the Supreme Court maintains its slight majority in favor of upholding the decision. At least five Supreme Court justices support upholding court precedents on abortion rights, but if a supporter of Roe were replaced by a conservative nominee under a McCain administration, it could tip the majority against abortion rights.

Through most of the 1990s and until recently, the Supreme Court had a solid 6-3 majority in favor of upholding the right of a woman to choose abortion, reports the Times. But the margin has shrunk to one, now that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is retired and has been replaced by Justice Samuel A Alito. And Justice John Paul Stevens, a leader of the narrow majority for abortion rights, is 88. Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor and former lawyer for NARAL Pro-Choice America, said: “Clearly, Roe is on the line this time,” adding: “It is quite clear they have four votes against it. If the next president appoints one more, the odds are it will be overruled.” Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way, said: “What we find scary is that people don’t understand what’s at stake. In the next four years, one to as many as three Supreme Court justices may step down, and they all will come from the liberal end of the court.” Wendy Long, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas and counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, said she believes the “consensus is Roe will fall slowly and incrementally, not in one decision” (Savage, Los Angeles Times, 5/10).

According to Salon, any effort by McCain to replace a more liberal justice with a more conservative one would probably be very tough because there seems little doubt that the Senate will remain in the control of the Democrats. That majority could prevent McCain from selecting individuals as conservative as Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito. “Still, the Democrats might find it harder to block a minority or female nominee, just as they failed to block Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation, despite a Democratic majority in the Senate,” Salon reports (Chemerinsky, Salon, 6/10).

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman in an opinion piece writes that McCain is “out to overturn” Roe. Abortion-rights groups have been “crying wolf for so long that it’s hard to believe that the wolf is actually at the door,” but a ballot measure in South Dakota aimed at banning abortions except in cases of rape or incest, to save a woman’s life or to avert a “substantial and irreversible” maternal health risk of impairment to “a major bodily organ or system” is “directly pointed at Roe and targeted to arrive at the Supreme Court in time to greet a new justice,” according to Goodman. She adds, “If what happens in South Dakota doesn’t stay in South Dakota, a woman’s right will depend on whether she has enough gas to drive to the next, or the next or the next state” (Goodman, Boston Globe, 4/10).

New Scientist reports that this November voters in Colorado will decide on whether to amend the state’s constitution so that a “person” would “include any human being from the moment of fertilization”. The amendment was drafted by Rob Muise and colleagues at the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative religious legal organisation based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By assigning rights to the embryo, it would probably make both abortion and stem cell research illegal, according to New Scientist. “Pro-choice advocates would challenge the law in court, creating what Muise calls a legislative ‘train wreck’: a series of appeals by one or both sides that would eventually take the case to the Supreme Court, which by then might have a conservative and anti-abortion majority” (Giles, New Scientist, 26/9).

Cardinal Justin Rigali, chair of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said: “The Catholic Church strongly supports promising and ethically sound stem cell research - and strongly opposes killing week-old human embryos, or human beings at any stage, to extract their stem cells” (The Wall Street Journal, 30/9). The Vatican has opened an office in Brussels and works hard together with other conservative forces for the implementation of more restrictive abortion laws and for the preference of Catholic Law above EU laws (Wikstrom, International Viewpoint, Sept). Should conservative Christian legal groups succeed in the US Supreme Court, the profound consequences for science may very well be felt in Europe. So, in the section of our campaign in support of human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning called “Religion in Public Life”, we will monitor Roe v Wade.

The Washington Independent reports that last year the Supreme Court voted in a 5-4 decision to uphold a federal ban on late term abortions, regardless of the health of the mother. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision “alarming”. She wrote: “It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between pre-viability and post-viability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.”

Next President to Reshape US Supreme Court

Declan's petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning was signed by four scientists on Thursday – the largest number of signatories in one day since 18 March – and four on Friday. Nonetheless, I believe that the vast majority of emails that I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign the petition are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September "Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding"). In fact, between Thursday and Friday I emailed a total of 323 scientists and academics, and received only 11 out-of-office autoreplies. Three examples: (a) 24 emails to the Randall Division of Cell & Molecular Biophysics at King's College London yielded zero autoreplies – and zero signatories; (b) 71 emails to the
International Brain Barriers Society yielded one autoreply – and one signatory; and (c) 26 emails to the Centre for Neuroscience Research at the University of Edinburgh yielded one autoreply – and again only one signatory. Are the emails I send being sent to spam (where they may still be accessed) or to cyberspace? Well, on Friday I sent some bogus emails together with the genuine ones – for example, I added an extra “k” to “@imperial.ac.uk” – but none came back as “Undelivered Mail”.

It is also increasingly difficult to book computers at our local council's Idea Store Whitechapel library because for many weeks now half the computers have been down: floor 1 has 24 computers but only nine are currently available for booking; floors 2, 3, and 4 only have a few computers and half of them are down. Yesterday, for the first time in almost two years, the only available computer for today was on floor 4, in the cafeteria – and when I checked the state of play for tomorrow, the computer I usually book was already taken. So this afternoon I had no choice but to go to a local internet café where we get seven hours for £3 – money we frequently don't have (see blog of 16 August “Letter to the European Court of Human Rights”).

Majority of One Stevens at the Supreme Court

“Last year, the US Supreme Court voted in a 5-4 decision to uphold a federal ban on late term abortions, regardless of the health of the mother,” writes Daphne Eviatar for the Washington Independent in an article titled “Next President to Reshape Court”. The decision not only signaled a significant shift in the court's approach to the controversial abortion issue, but revealed just how important the composition of the Supreme Court can be – and the extraordinary power the next president will have to control that.

The last time the court visited the abortion question, in 2000, it had struck down an almost identical Nebraska law – in part, because it didn't account for the woman's health. “Nothing had changed between then and the court's 2007 ruling,” writes Eviatar. “Except, that is, the composition of the court.” In 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who had consistently upheld the right to privacy that protected abortion ever since Roe v Wade, retired. President George W Bush had since appointed John Roberts as chief justice and Samuel Alito as associate justice.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has said repeatedly that if he's the next president, he'll appoint more justices like Roberts and Alito. “John McCain’s appointment of the next justice could be the most significant appointment in half a century,” said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, noting that the trend has been toward appointing younger justices who could be on the court for 30 or 40 years. “We would have a solid far-right conservative block for the next several decades. That cannot be undone by a subsequent election if people decide that the court is far to the right of them. There’s nothing we can do as citizens.”

In a New York Times article dated 23 September 2007 Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote: “Justice [John Paul] Stevens, the oldest and arguably most liberal justice, now finds himself the leader of the opposition.” Stevens, however, is an improbable liberal icon. “I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told Rosen during an interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative”, he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues. “Including myself,” he said, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” – nominated by Richard Nixon in 1971 – “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”

In her dissent in last year's abortion case, Justice Ginsburg called the decision “alarming”. She wrote: “It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between pre-viability and post-viability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.”

“A President McCain will likely have a much greater opportunity to move the Supreme Court than would a President Obama,” said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a legal watchdog group in Washington. “Simply because it is actually likely that the justices that retire during the next presidency will be the court's more liberal justices. So a conservative president could move the court sharply to the right, while a progressive president will most likely be replacing existing progressive justices.” (If Obama had the opportunity to make an appointment, it would be only the fourth nomination from a Democratic president in more than 40 years.)

At 88, Stevens is widely expected to retire within the next few years. Others have speculated that Ginsberg, 75, or even David Souter, who has admitted he’s considered resigning, could depart as well. “McCain could finally achieve what conservative legal activists have been looking for decades,” said Kendall, “which is a truly conservative, if not reactionary, Supreme Court.” Eviatar: “Because so many of the court’s recent rulings have been decided by a narrow 5-4 majority, the change in just one justice could yield a fundamental change in the enforcement of civil rights, the ability of the federal government to regulate safety and the environment, the breadth of executive power and the reach of habeas corpus.”

What the Republican Party’s conservative base cares about is the Supreme Court, said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University. “Issues like reproductive rights, religion in schools, religion in public life. A lot of what they care about they can’t do any other way,” he said. “If the Supreme Court solidifies into a conservative institution there will be a much more concerted effort by litigants and sympathetic state and local officials to frame cases that bring those issues to the court’s attention,” said Kendall. So, in addition to two sections – “Science and Religion” (see blog of 16 September “Royal Society's stance on religion under fire”) and “Science and the Law” (see blog of 28 September “New Scientist: Their Will Be Done”) – our campaign in support of human embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning will also have a final section called “Religion in Public Life”.

Nobel laureates line up behind Obama's science policy

Photos left to right: Harold Varmus, H Robert Horvitz, and Peter Agre

On the eve of the first US presidential debate, a list of 61 Nobel laureates issued an open letter (see also below) to urge Americans to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. This is the largest number of Nobel laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, more than endorsed either Gore or Kerry, says Scientists and Engineers for America. All received their award for achievements in physics (22), chemistry (14) or medicine (25). The letter was announced on Thursday in a conference call by three Nobel laureates: Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Peter Agre, director of the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; and H Robert Horvitz, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Ten of the signatories have also signed Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning, which now has been signed by 540 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel laureates.)

Calling the Bush Administration's science policy “disastrous”, Horvitz, who won a Nobel Prize in medicine in 2002, spoke in support of Obama's science policy, which includes elevating the role of White House science adviser to a senior-level position and reversing the ban on using federal funds for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research on cell lines created after 9 August 2001, reports The Boston Globe. “Instead of shutting scientific knowledge out of the White House, Senator Obama will engage top scientists,” Horvitz said. “Instead of blocking groundbreaking efforts to use embryonic stem cell research to find cures for diseases like Parkinson's disease … Senator Obama will provide strong support to these efforts” (see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”).

The three scientists said they couldn’t trust Republican presidential candidate John McCain's positions regarding science policy because of political pressure from religious conservatives. They were particularly concerned about McCain's position on federal funding of hESC research. McCain says he supports it, but in the heat of the campaign, according to this week’s Nature journal, “he now refuses to say whether he would lift the ban as president. Instead, he emphasizes research on adult or induced pluripotent stem cells in place of human embryonic ones”. Said Agre, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2003: “While I think that Senator McCain has in the past ... had some reasonably progressive views, he's now in the difficult position of reconciling his views with that of the Republican platform” (see blog of 1 September “2008 GOP platform calls for total ban on embryonic stem cell research”).

Harold Varmus, who is an Obama campaign science adviser, and who won a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1989, said that there's general confusion in the scientific community over McCain's position. Physicsworld.com notes that Obama beat McCain by more than two weeks to answering the questions posed by ScienceDebate – an organisation formed last year that tried, and failed, to persuade the presidential candidates to attend a televised debate on science policy. On Wednesday, Obama again trumped the Republican by being the only candidate to answer 18 science-related questions asked by Nature.

Princeton professor Philip Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1977 and who was one of the signatories (he is also a NAC Honorary Associate) told physicsworld.com that voting for Obama in November would be a “no-brainer”. Referring to why he would not choose McCain, he added: “There are too many obvious reasons to pick one. Let me name three. 1. Torture; 2. Tax cuts for the rich; 3. A [running mate, Sarah Palin] who believes in the Apocalypse and not in evolution.”

The same day the letter was released, the Obama campaign published an 11-page policy document entitled, “Investing in America’s future: Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan for science and innovation”, pledging to double federal funding for research over 10 years. An Obama-Biden administration, they say on their website, would change “the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology”.

This is the open letter:

An Open Letter to the American People

This year's presidential election is among the most significant in our nation's history. The country urgently needs a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.

We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.

During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.

We have watched Senator Obama's approach to these issues with admiration. We especially applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance our nation's competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take - through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research - to meet the nation's and the world's most urgent needs.

Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world's leading country. We hope you will join us as we work together to ensure his election in November.

Signed,

Click here to read the original with signers