PIONEERING:
An ampoule for stem-cell storage was displayed at the UK Stem Cell Bank north of London this week.
Critics who claim that embryonic stem-cell research should be equated ethically with human experiments at Dachau and other Nazi death camps helped persuade George W. Bush to announce his “compromise” in 2001: No federal funding for research on any but a disputed number of existing stem-cell lines.
In Britain, critics make the same arguments, but they haven’t been allowed to shout down the scientific community as in America. Consequently, this week the British government funded the
world’s first stem-cell bank. The stem cells will be available to researchers worldwide, although that will be cold comfort to U.S. scientists without private funding.
By Mark Rice-Oxley
...
The idea is to provide a repository for these scientifically valuable stem cells that researchers the world over can "withdraw" and use without having to go through the scientific and legal hurdles of generating their own.
The UK Stem Cell bank, based at a facility just north of London, could help accelerate therapies for a wide range of genetic disorders and regenerative treatments. The bank, set up with $4.6 million of state money, will position Britain at the forefront of the science, capitalizing on its long history of pioneering work in genetics and its robust legal, regulatory, secular, and institutional framework.
But opponents say the process of creating embryos only to exploit them for therapeutic purposes is abhorrent. "We believe evil should never be done even though good may come of it," says Josephine Quintavalle of the ProLife Alliance in London. "Plenty of good [scientific] ideas came from the extermination of victims of Nazi concentration camps."
Stem-cell research involves harvesting embryos within the first two weeks of their creation, when young cells have the potential to develop into any organ. Researchers hope to use the cells both to "grow" replacement organs and identify genetic imperfections that lead to illnesses like Huntington's disease or Alzheimer's. Most embryos harvested in this fashion are "spare" matter from in vitro fertilization (IVF) programs. …
The bank, based at Britain's National Institute for Biological Standards and Controls, will make this highly limited resource much more widely available, by culturing the stem-cell lines "deposited" by researchers and systematically distributing them to licensed scientists around the world. ...
Since scientists will be able, through the bank, to "share" stem cells, it will reduce dramatically the number of embryos required. It will also facilitate a comparison of results. "It's opening up the potential of working on stem cells to a vastly larger group of scientists," says Alf Game, head of genetics at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, a government agency that helped set up the bank.
So why is Britain positioning itself as the global capital of the new science? The country has a long, strong history of pioneering work in reproductive sciences. The first mammal cloned from an adult cell - Dolly the sheep - was the work of an Edinburgh research institute. …
The secularity of the country has also given an added impetus to the science's development in Britain. "Stem-cell research has been very widely supported by the religious communities here too, based on the factual evidence that embryos do not have a moral status of human beings," says Prof. Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, which co-founded the bank.
Say Goodbye to the Polar Bear
The Third Assessment of the
International Panel on Climate Change, published in 2001, predicted that by 2100
summertime Arctic temperatures would average 10 to 12 degrees Celsius higher than they were in the 1990s. The effects on sea levels,
wildlife and human endeavor could be devastating.
But, hey, between now and 2100 there are a lot of other things to worry about, right? Unfortunately, it appears the IPCC’s timeline may be a tad off.
A British Arctic explorer says he already encountered temperatures 10 to 13 degrees warmer than they were on a similar expedition three years ago.
By David Ljunggren
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Summer temperatures in the Arctic have risen at an incredible rate over the past three years and large patches of what should be ice are now open water, a British polar explorer said on Monday.
Ben Saunders, forced by the warm weather to abandon an attempt to ski solo from northern Russia across the North Pole to Canada, said he had been amazed at how much of the ice had melted.
"It's obvious to me that things are changing a lot and changing very quickly," a sunburned Saunders told Reuters less than two days after being rescued from the thinning ice sheet close to the North Pole.
The temperatures were incredibly warm ... I had days when I could ski with no gloves and no hat at all, just in bare hands, because I was too hot," said Saunders.
Logs from an expedition in 2001 showed the average Arctic temperature at this time of year was minus 15 to minus 20 degrees Celsius (plus 5 to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit).
Saunders said the average temperature this time was just minus 5 to minus 7 degrees Celsius (23 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit).