California Stem Cell Trial Starts Tomorrow!

Stay posted for exciting legal news! Court TV this blog is not (probably a good thing), but I'll try to give you breathless and suspense-filled coverage of what's happening at the Hayward Hall of Justice.

Just to give you a sample, here's news from the court website about a motion that was also to be heard tomorrow:

"The Motion of Nonparty Legislative Analyst's Office to Quash Subpoena, set on an Order Shortening Time, is dropped by the Court as MOOT in light of the representation by counsel for Plaintiff California Family Bioethics Council that the challenged subpoenas have been withdrawn."

Ready?

State Politics

State Politics

Two states are in the news this weekend, Maryland and Georgia. In Maryland, the proposed $25 million per year bill for stem cell research passed two committees in the House of Delegates and is now going to the full floor for debate. This is a separate bill from the proposed $20 million called for by the governor as part of his budget proposal. The Washington Post reports that the bills passed committee largely along party lines and that Republicans say language in the bill giving preference to projects not eligible for federal funding would give most of the money to embryonic stem cell research. The Baltimore Sun reports that Governor Ehrlich’s plan includes an additional $13.5 million for a center for regenerative medicine in Baltimore, and that the House of Delegates Speaker expects the bill to be introduced for debate on Monday.

Meanwhile in Georgia, the Gwinnett Daily Post (how’s that for mainstream media?) reports on conflicting bills in the state Senate. One, introduced two weeks ago, authorizes embryonic stem cell research, while the second, introduced this week, is an umbilical cord blood bill. The sponsor of the latter says that he is sidestepping the controversy and allowing research to go forward. He is also the chair of the Senate Science and Technology Committee. Both bills prohibit human reproductive cloning. The first bill, SB 537, permits somatic cell nuclear transfer. The second bill, SB 596, prohibits cloning for research purposes.

I’m having trouble imagining embryonic stem cell research passing in Georgia, the state of the “evolution is not a fact” textbook sticker. Something is obviously going to happen in Maryland, but it’s unclear to me what the final outcome will be.

States are really separating from each other on a number of issues—not just stem cell research, but also abortion, gay marriage, tobacco, teaching of anti-evolutionist ideas…. I don’t see any of these as becoming issues that would precipitate a civil war as the division over slavery did, but something is going to come to some kind of a head at some point. It’s all very well to have state’s rights if you’re afraid that your federal government will become tyrannical, a la George III, but if states become too separate from each other how do you have any sort of a national agenda?

International Stem Cell Guidelines

International Stem Cell Guidelines

Researchers and others (lawyers, journal editors, etc.) from 14 countries have come up with a set of ethical guidelines for stem cell research. The meeting was part of a three day conference in Cambridge, England. A story which appeared in the Belfast Telegraph, among other newspapers (also the Guardian), reports that the group also has included a request that the governments of countries where stem cell research is illegal not prosecute scientists for taking part in research abroad. The guidelines are voluntary.

The BBC reports that, “The delegates have now formed the Hinxton Group, an interdisciplinary consortium on stem cell ethics and law, which will meet regularly to further discuss these issues.” It also says that

Recommendations the group propose include:

getting journals to ask researchers to include statements confirming their research conforms to national guidelines

a public website for international researchers to share information about research codes and ethical protocols

an attempt to reach an international ethical consensus on new areas of research, including the creation of human-animal chimeras

One of the many issues is that since different countries have different laws—and the US has a further patchwork of laws differing from state to state—research can’t be done consistently across international boundaries. The hope is that the guidelines will encourage international collaboration.

Interestingly, this story does not seem to have been carried by the American press. The reporting in the sources I have seen is all fairly thin on the specific guidelines—what do they say about egg donation, for example? I couldn’t find a press release either.