Obama Removes Limits to Stem Cell Research

In another rebuke of the neanderthal administration of George W. Bush, President Barack Obama reversed the Bush administration limits on embryonic stem-cell research. This is a bold move to separate politics from science.

Obama overturned an order signed by President Bush in 2001 that barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time. Bush twice vetoed legislation that would have expanded federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Those siding with Bush say scientific advances allow researchers to conduct groundbreaking research without destroying human embryos.

What follows are excerpts from the Boston Globe story of Obama's lifting of the ban on embryonic stem cell research:

CAMBRIDGE - Feasting on a celebratory spread of pastries, sheet cake, and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, Harvard scientists watched in rapt silence, smiles spreading over their faces, as President Obama yesterday lifted eight-year-old restrictions on stem cell research and announced a broader commitment to science.

At the morning screening, held in a fourth-floor conference room just down the hallway from biology laboratories, students gathered alongside senior researchers to revel in a moment that will change their careers - whether they are just about to set up their own laboratories or are looking back on years of work that has been hindered by Bush administration limits on human embryonic stem cell research.

"I have never been comfortable as being seen in opposition to my government, let alone our nation's leader," said Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "The dark ages are now over for our lab."

Obama yesterday followed through on promises he made during his election campaign, signing an executive order allowing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and directing the National Institutes of Health to write guidelines within 120 days for how the research should be conducted.

"Ultimately, I cannot guarantee that we will find the treatments and cures we seek. No president can promise that," Obama said. "But I can promise that we will seek them - actively, responsibly, and with the urgency required to make up for lost ground."

He also signed a memorandum to elevate science within his administration, clarify the responsibilities of the office of science and technology policy, and ensure that "we base our public policies on the soundest science . . . and that we are open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions."

At a press conference later in the day, Lawrence Tabak acting deputy director of the NIH, which received $8.2 billion for research in the stimulus package, said the agency planned to move quickly so that embryonic stem cell work could be funded through that package.

"We anticipate that stimulus resources will be able to be used under the context of the new guidelines," Tabak said, although he did not have specifics on how much money would be allocated.

Human embryonic stem cells have the capacity to develop into any tissue in the body, such as insulin-producing cells that might eventually be used to treat diabetes, or neurons that could replace ones that die off during Lou Gehrig's disease. The potent cells are seen as important research tools, as well as promising treatments. But they have caused much political and ethical debate because human embryos are destroyed when the cells are extracted.

In relation to Obama's overturn of stem cell research limits, Nancy Reagan released the following statement. Nancy Reagan has been an outspoken advocate of stem cell research — and scientists hope that the research could someday lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicted her late husband, President Ronald Reagan.

I’m very grateful that President Obama has lifted the restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research,” she wrote in a statement released shortly after Obama reversed the Bush administration limits. “These new rules will now make it possible for scientists to move forward. I urge researchers to make use of the opportunities that are available to them and to do all they can to fulfill the promise that stem cell research offers.

Countless people, suffering from many different diseases, stand to benefit from the answers stem cell research can provide. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to do everything in our power to find cures for these diseases — and soon. As I’ve said before, time is short, and life is precious.

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During his first weeks in office, Obama made good on his promise that scientific decisions must be "based on facts, not ideology."

The Bush administration came under frequent criticism from environmentalists who warned the president wasn't doing enough to lessen what they saw as the damaging impact the United States has on the globe.

Within a week of taking office, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to review a California application to regulate greenhouse gases and told his Department of Transportation to begin implementing fuel efficiency standards passed last year but not implemented by the Bush administration. If the EPA grants a waiver allowing California to set its own emissions standards, the nation's most populous state will be allowed to require automakers to produce trucks and cars that get better mileage than what is required under the current national standard. Thirteen other states could take similar action.

The Bush administration rejected California's application, agreeing with automakers that the creation of another set of rules regarding pollution standards for some states would be confusing and unenforceable. In Obama's recent speech to Congress, the president said the United States will double its supply of renewable energy in three years. To do so, he's calling on a new class of workers to be trained in environmental fields. Green jobs training programs will get $500 million from his stimulus package.

In another break from the Bush administration, Obama last week overturned a regulation that many environmentalists claim weakened the Endangered Species Act. The regulation, issued a few weeks before Bush left office, made it easier for federal agencies to skip consultations with government scientists before launching projects that could affect endangered wildlife.

By overturning the regulation, Obama said he had restored "the scientific process to its rightful place at the heart of the Endangered Species Act, a process undermined by past administrations."

Obama hasn't shied away from talking about climate change. He campaigned on promises to eliminate oil imports from the Middle East, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and create a green energy economy.

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plez sez: it took about 2 seconds before the first right wing nut job threw a hizzy fit over PRESIDENT OBAMA lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research. in an interview, newt gingrich - former speaker of the house and probable 2012 republican contestant for president - said that the Obama move was an "ideological sideshow." claiming this move will embolden the right wing coalition to stop everything. hmmmm... didn't every last member of the house vote against the stimulus plan? i don't think this move will move the needle for these guys.

personally, i think that these kind of decisions, especially in the realm of pure medical science, the need for government intervention and oversight is stifling to creativity and innovation. if one were to go back and look at what dr. jonas salk did in creating the polio vaccine, we'd probably be shocked at some of his experiments. as the old saying goes: "you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet!" oops... maybe this wasn't the best time for that analogy! *smile*

when medical issues are no longer politicized, there can be advances when scientists and doctors can do what they do best... do research! i'm sure if there weren't such a stigma (gay men, black men, sex, illegal drug use, etc.) attached to HIV & AIDS, there'd be a cure by now.

~ ~ Citations ~ ~

Read the Boston Globe article about Obama reversing Bush's ban on embryonic stem cell research.

Read the CNN.com article about Obama moves to separate science from politics.

Read the Washington Post article about Obama and stem cell research limits.

Read the POLITICO.com article about Nancy Reagan's praise of Barack Obama.

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"Letter from Birmingham Jail" Redux on MLK Jr Day

In April 1963 (only 45 years ago), a young Martin Luther King, Jr. (then only 34 years old) lead a march in Birmingham, Alabama for which he was jailed. While he sat in his jail cell, a group of clergymen sent him a letter which basically asked him why he brought his demonstrations to disrupt the peace of Birmingham.

Dr. King set pen to scraps of paper in his jail cell and wrote what plezWorld considers to be the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence -- all rolled into one -- of the Civil Rights Movement, as a reply to the clergymen's letter.

It is interesting to note that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson alittle over a year later, thanks in large measure to the efforts of one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we pause to celebrate the life of the Greatest American, tarry a few minutes in plezWorld and read Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. This letter is not as widely publicized and distributed as the "I Have A Dream" or "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speeches, but this letter lays out the entire rationale and strategy of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King's stunning prose, and his grasp of psychology and human history while being confined to a jail cell is mind boggling. Excerpts of the letter follows:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century BC left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

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You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

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We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

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My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

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You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Read or download the pdf version of the entire Letter from Birmingham here.

Access the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" website to get a thorough explanation of the letter and its structure.


plez sez: Happy Birthday, Dr. King (January 15, 1929 - April 3, 1968)!