With its guidelines, the administration is stepping into a politically delicate issue that has pitted antiabortion activists against ailing patients. Med-Tech Everybody's got issues in Politics The Post , quoting sources briefed on the plan, said the new guidelines spell out in great detail the ethical and scientific criteria that the National Institutes of Health will weigh as it considers the first applications for federal grant money to study human embryonic stem cells. Experts think the research has the potential to transform medicine, offering treatments and even cures for diseases such as juvenile diabetes, in which the pancreas is partly destroyed, heart disease, and Parkinson's. The hope is to direct this development so they can be used for tissue and even organ transplants. But current law forbids the use of federal funds to harm a human embryo, so federally funded scientists may not extract these cells from human embryos to use for research.
Opponents say getting the cells involves the taking of a human life, and that no end justifies it.
The Post said the new guidelines will insist that federal research be conducted only on cells taken from frozen embryos that were destined to be discarded anyway, and that no federal money is used for the destruction of embryos to get the cells. That job would have to be done by privately funded researchers who could then pass the useful cells to federally supported scientists, creating a separation of responsibility for the embryo's destruction that opponents have criticized as morally meaningless, according to the Post report. The new rule will disallow payments to embryo donors and will preclude donors from specifying who should receive their embryo's stem cells. Those provisions aim to discourage the creation of a market in embryo cells and block any incentive for a woman to create fresh embryos just to provide a potential treatment for a sick relative. Patient support groups hailed the new rule, which was held up for more than a year after the NIH was flooded with public comments on an earlier draft, the Post said.