The Red and Black

Issue date: 3/19/09 Section: News

Media Credit: LESLEY ONSTOTT [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: LESLEY ONSTOTT [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: LESLEY ONSTOTT (Top) Alex Squires, 20, a student from Richmond Hill, Ga., is majoring in cognitive science and cellular biology and works in the animal science laboratory. (Left) Kate Hodges, from Athens, creates glass tools to move stem cells from dish to dish. Research on stem cells could be stopped if the new state law is passed. [Click to enlarge]

On the heels of President Barack Obama's termination of an eight-year ban on stem cell research, the Georgia Senate is debating a bill that would essentially continue old restrictions.

Dr. Steve Stice, director of the Regenerative Bioscience Center, said he worries that if the bill passes, it could have serious repercussions for the University.

"We've got great students at UGA, and we'd like to recruit even more," he said in a phone interview Wednesday. "It's hard to recruit students and faculty to come to a University in a state that's viewed as being basically backward in their view of technology."

Despite possible setbacks from the state, Stice said he was excited about the Obama administration's changes because the majority of his lab's funding comes from the federal government.

"It's not opening the floodgates on research dollars, which really would be fantastic, but it's the first step hopefully toward more funding," he said.

One of the RBC's largest federal grants comes from the Department of Defense, which is asking researchers to develop a medicine that can be injected in broken bones, stimulating growth and cutting healing time by more than 91 percent - from six months to two weeks, Stice said.

"The idea is that today when people have major injuries to their limbs, there's a lot of defects and loss of bone and it results oftentimes in amputation, and when limbs are not amputated, the patient can be in bed for months at a time," Stice explained.

According to Stice, most of the RBC is researching cells related to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Tulsi Patel, a senior from Acworth and researcher at the RBC, studies these cells but worries about her ability to continue her research if the state law is passed.

"It will undo any progress that Obama does in Georgia," she said in a phone interview Tuesday. "I don't think we'd make a lot of progress for a long time if we don't get as much funding."

Either way, Patel said cures for serious diseases could be a long way off.

"A lot of stem cell work going on right now is ground work," she said. "We don't take a disease and work on it, we just work on the development."

If passed, the state law would stop the derivation of any new embryonic stem cell lines, where researchers take a three to five-day-old embryo and grow its cells in a laboratory.

"Basically it's a hollow sphere with a bunch of cells in it," Patel explained. "You take a few of those cells and grow them in vitro. They basically keep dividing, indefinitely as far as we know."

The lines the RBC are working on were derived before the Bush Administration's ban on new lines. According to Patel, the cells the RBC used to create its line were "taken from defective embryos, so these were embryos that couldn't turn into babies."

Stice said he believes the RBC's ability to receive funding becomes unjustly caught up in issues surrounding abortion. He explained that fertility clinics attempting in vitro fertilization often are unsuccessful, resulting in embryos with no chance at life.

"Those are discarded every day, and that would be something that I would think, no matter what side you're on, would be a morally acceptable way of developing stem cells," he said.

Patel expressed her excitement that in the coming years, this whole debate could be irrelevant.

"Just in the last year or two, labs found that if you take skin cells and activate five genes you basically turn them back into what seems to be an embryonic type cell," she said. "It has the potential to take the [pro-life] problem out [of stem cell research]."

Regardless, the debate is still happening in the Georgia senate, and Stice said he worries about the RBC's future.

"If the bill passed, would it stop our research tomorrow? No, but it would have a major impact over time on our institution."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools