Posted by Ellen on November 02, 2001 at 05:47:33:
In Reply to: Re: Stem Cell Registry to Be Posted Within a Week, Official Says posted by Ellen on November 01, 2001 at 14:02:30:
Rambam expert to brief US Senate on stem cells
By Judy Siegel
(November 1) - One of the country's leading experts on stem cells has flown to Washington to appear before a special Senate committee that is discussing the use of cloning human stem cells for research purposes.
Prof. Josef Itskovits, head of Rambam Hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department, heads a group of Israeli researchers that two months ago announced it had succeeded in creating human heart cells from embryonic stem cells. The achievement was declared an important step toward transplants of heart muscle cells in patients with heart disease, but there is still a long way to go before it is implemented, he said.
The Bush administration and the US Congress decided last August that the government would forbid federal funding for research on human stem cell cloning - even for research - except from stem cells that already exist. The Senate established a committee to discuss the issue. It invited leading experts in the field to testify. So far, 64 existing embryonic stem cell lines, four of which were created in Israel, have been recognized by the Bush administration as the basis for cloning research.
Itskovits notes that the stem cells were derived from embryos frozen when they were only a few days old, after the parents had completed their in-vitro fertilization treatments and the embryos would have otherwise been discarded. Dr. Yitzhak Zeidis, deputy director of Haifa's Rambam, will also appear before the Senate committee.