Bush Administration Order Halts
Stem Cell Meeting
NIH Planned Session To Review Fund Requests
Date accessed: 08 May 2001
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2001; Page A02
The National Institutes of Health has canceled next week's inaugural meeting of a committee that was to review the first applications from scientists seeking federal funds for human embryo cell research. It did so, agency officials said, after officials of the Department of Health and Human Services told them to cancel the meeting.
The order, which was not announced publicly, is the most direct action yet by President Bush or his appointees in the scientific and ethical controversy over human embryonic stem cell research. The cells have the potential to grow into all kinds of human tissues and may someday prove invaluable in the treatment of many disorders, including diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries. But they are controversial because they are retrieved from "spare" human embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics.
The NIH had been moving forward with the grant approval process because the top HHS lawyer in the Clinton administration had deemed such funding legal. But HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson has ordered a review of that decision.
"The bottom line is the department felt that it makes the most sense to hold off until the guideline review that the department is doing is complete," said HHS spokesman Bill Hall.
Hall said there is no timetable for the completion of that review, but he expected it to be finished sometime this summer. He said he did not know whether the decision to halt the NIH meeting was made by Thompson or Bush, who in recent months has expressed his belief that federal money should not be used to fund research on cells from human embryos or from aborted fetuses, another source of stem cells.
Scientists and patient advocates who had hoped the promising field was finally poised to get federal support expressed anger and frustration yesterday as word of the cancellation spread by e-mail and phone. Some complained privately that the NIH, which apparently did not fight the orders from HHS, had been "bought" by the Bush administration, which is offering the agency a 13.5 percent increase next fiscal year.
Next Wednesday's meeting was to be the culmination of many months of legal research, policy planning and the promulgation of new scientific and ethical guidelines. Under the new guidelines, finalized last August, federal funds cannot be used to destroy human embryos. But they can be used to study cells that other, privately funded scientists have retrieved from spare human embryos discarded at fertility clinics, as long as proper permission has been granted by the mother and other ethics restrictions are followed.
The first applications for such research grants -- and the first documentation from potential embryo-cell distributors assuring that their cells have been retrieved in accordance with the guidelines -- were to be reviewed Wednesday by a newly formed committee, the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Review Group.
But that all changed when NIH acting director Ruth Kirschstein received word from HHS last week to cancel the meeting. An NIH employee passed the word by telephone to the approximately dozen committee members, whose names the NIH has refused to make public. According to one member reached yesterday, no explanation was given for the cancellation and no hint was given as to whether or when the meeting might be rescheduled.
"It's unfortunate," said the member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It certainly is holding up research that could potentially affect a lot of people with a number of different diseases. Time is being lost."
The committee member said that the group includes a wide range of scientific, ethical and theological expertise and opinion, and includes at least one "mainstream Catholic."
Some opponents have argued that certain cells that can be obtained from adults may have the same potential as embryonic stem cells.
Doug Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said he supported the Bush administration's review of the NIH guidelines. The Clinton administration opinion that it is legal to fund embryo cell research is "not an opinion, it's an evasion of the law," Johnson said.
The law, in this case, is a rider that has been added annually to the appropriations bill for the NIH that precludes funding of research that causes the destruction of embryos. The legal question is whether that language is violated by funding research that does not itself involve the destruction of embryos but depends on their destruction by others as a source of cells.
According to the guidelines, cells may be used only if the embryos were going to be destroyed by parents anyway.
The meeting cancellation left many NIH-watchers scrambling to interpret the political meaning. Tim Leshen, director of public policy for the American Society for Cell Biology, said it was encouraging that the administration chose to cancel the meeting rather than sign an executive order blocking such funding once and for all.
However, Leshen and others said the move may be a hint that the administration plans to find a legal basis for blocking the funding and wants to avoid the predicament of having already awarded some grants when the ax comes down.
Stanford researcher and Nobel laureate Paul Berg said he feared that U.S. researchers stand to lose their edge in the biomedical revolution because Britain, France and Canada have been passing more liberal rules for research on embryo cells.
"We have a major part of the world's science talent pool, but our hands are tied behind our backs in this area," Berg said. "Why are we behind the eight ball on this?"
Category: 31. Stem Cells