It's official...
we have our first benefit.
Corporate researchers working outside controversial federal restraints said Thursday that they had engineered human stem cells that they believe could be used to repair eyes.
The team at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts worked with stem cells taken from human embryos made by a team at Harvard University, and coaxed them to form retinal cells.
"We believe these new retinal cells could be used to treat blindness and may, in fact, be one of the very first applications of embryonic stem-cell technology," said Dr. Robert Lanza, Advanced Cell Technology's scientific director.
Embryonic stem cells into retinal cells. That's impressive.
Now, the thing to notice here of course is that this was done by "Corporate researchers." Why? Because Mr. Bush only made government funding available for those 60 old lines, most of which didn't really exist. So if anyone wanted to do this research, it would have to be corporations; Harvard themselves probably couldn't get the funding to do it.
So, some of you may be wondering..."Isn't this an argument against government funding" or "Can't we just let industry do it?" While I will accept that there is a place for industry, keep this in mind; industry is devoted entirely to developing applications. They will not do some of the basic research that can drive these sorts of technologies in new directions. Their goal is to produce something that is marketable.
In addition, through Bush's limits on funding, many research groups are simply unable to participate in this sort of research. They don't have the funds or the access to the materials needed. If a research group takes funds from the NSF or NIH, they're bound by Bush's restrictions on which lines they can use. What does this do? It dramatically cuts back the amount of time, energy, and thought that can get put into this research. And therefore, it acts like a giant break on the advancing of the technology.
For all we know, had Bush not slapped those limits on stem cell research, we might have seen this come out a year ago, and had a viable treatment method for blindness by now. Or we might have had 10 different potential benefits being reported in my paper instead of 1. Not all of them are going to work, and for all we know they won't be able to find a way to use this in a treatment, but it's a hugely positive step and one that was accomplished over significant obstacles.
This research shows even more promise than it did yesterday.