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.

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.”

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”.

Washing in the street

All this week Declan has been walking for almost five hours with his bags. A round walk of over two hours to the Manna Centre to get some free lunch – where last Saturday, a big homeless Pole booted him hard in the calf. Then two or three times to his Big Issue pitch where he attempts to sell a couple of Big Issues (a magazine sold by homeless people) – on Tuesday afternoon he shouldn’t have bothered: the Big Issue vendor he found on his pitch informed him he was working on it. And he also meets me in the Idea Store Whitechapel library – the same place we regularly run into difficulties with internet access (see previous blog for Declan’s email to the Leader of Tower Hamlets Council). It is quite exhausting for him but it has kept us in the game.

In my blog of 26 March “We are seeking to raise £4,000” I wrote that on 17 March Network Rail effectively barred us from the public toilets in Liverpool Street Station (we had been forced to wash there after we were barred in June from the Methodist Church-run Whitechapel Mission due to concerns about our safety), and that Declan would have to further bullfight the homeless in the men's washroom of the Sister of Mercy-run Dellow Centre. Well, he is getting so much hassle there that this morning he had to shave in a park – last week he experienced serious harassment from one homeless and had to inform staff that he was on the verge of calling the police, and two days ago another homeless was shouting so loud while shadow boxing and kicking about the place that twice staff had to put in an appearance.


Human-animal embryos have caused controversy in the UK

The Christian Legal Centre (CLC) and Comment on Reproductive Ethics (Core) launched a legal challenge yesterday against the legality of licences granted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) that allowed the creation of Britain’s first human-animal hybrid embryo. It wants the licences granted to scientists at Newcastle University and King’s College London to be revoked so that no further experimentation is carried out. They made the move after Prime Minister Gordon Brown was forced last month to give Labour MPs a free vote on the Government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (legislation currently going through Parliament), which has faced condemnation from Catholic Church leaders. According to Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, the bill would lead to the endorsement of experiments of "Frankenstein proportions".

(Cardinal O'Brien doesn’t mind to disagree with many eminent scientists, including Lord Naren Patel of Dunkeld, chairman of the UK National Stem Cell Network and chancellor of Dundee University, who has said that the legislation would improve regulation of research that could help diabetics and those with Parkinson’s. He probably wasn’t impressed either with the headline on the front page of today’s Times “Scientists win public support on embryo research”: a poll for the newspaper reveals that the creation of human-animal embryos enjoys broad public approval, with 50 per cent backing new laws that would permit it and only 30 per cent opposed.)

Unlike Gordon Brown, President George W Bush scored points with the Christian Right in his final State of the Union address on 28 January. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) stated: “A high mark came when the President explained how advances in science have made embryonic stem cell research obsolete and then called on Congress to pass a comprehensive cloning ban, ensuring as he put it, ‘that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves’.” Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the US bishops' Office of Pro-Life Activities: "We certainly welcome the president's emphasis on increased funding for ethical stem-cell research, and we agree that passage of a ban on human cloning is long overdue." In response to the speech, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (established in 2004 with the passage of Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) promptly disagreed with President Bush’s stance: “Tonight, in his State of the Union address, President Bush distorted the scientific facts on stem cell research and did a disservice to the millions of patients suffering from chronic disease and injury for whom stem cell research holds great promise for future therapies and cures.”