Federal stem cell guidelines released.

• Position: YOUR LIFE - Brief article

Pres. Barack Obama's executive order removed the Bush Administration's restrictions on the Federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, but left the precise details up to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Washington, D.C. Accordingly, the agency has released draft guidelines, which would permit the funding of research with stem cell lines derived from embryos created--but not used--for fertility purposes, and establish strong requirements for informed consent. The guidelines exclude Federal funding for work with any potential stem cell lines derived from cloned human embryos using the procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

"Cloning-based stem cell research lays the technical foundation for human reproductive cloning--which the U.S., unlike dozens of other countries, has not yet prohibited--and requires enormous numbers of human eggs, whose extraction poses health risks to women. Despite years of work, no researcher has created a clonal human embryo viable enough to yield stem cells," explains Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and...