NIH Told to Cancel Stem-Cell Funding Meeting

WASHINGTON —  The National Institutes of Health have canceled next week’s inaugural meeting of a committee that was to review the first applications from scientists seeking federal funds for human embryonic cell research. It did so, agency officials said, after officials at the Department of Health and Human Services told them to cancel the meeting.

The order, which wasn’t announced publicly, is the most direct action yet by President Bush or his appointees in the scientific and ethical controversy over human embryonic stem-cell research.

The cells have the potential to grow into all kinds of human tissues and may someday prove invaluable in the treatment of many disorders, including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries. However, they are controversial because they are retrieved from “spare” human embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics.

NIH had been moving forward with the grant approval process because the top HHS lawyer under the Clinton administration had deemed such funding legal. New department Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, however, has ordered a review of that decision.

“The bottom line is the department felt that it makes the most sense to hold off until the guideline review that the department is doing is complete,” HHS spokesman Bill Hall said.

He added that there’s no timetable for its completion but that he expects it to be finished this summer. He said he didn’t know whether the decision to halt the NIH meeting was made by Thompson or by Bush, who in recent months has expressed his belief that federal money shouldn’t be used to fund research on cells from human embryos or from aborted fetuses, another source of stem cells.

Scientists and patient advocates who had hoped the promising field was finally poised to get federal support expressed anger and frustration Friday as word of the cancellation spread by e-mail and phone. Some complained privately that NIH, which apparently did not fight the order, had been “bought” by the Bush administration, which is offering the agency a 13.5% increase next fiscal year.

Wednesday’s meeting was to be the culmination of many months of legal research, policy planning and the promulgation of new scientific and ethical guidelines. Under the new guidelines, finalized in August, NIH-funded researchers aren’t allowed to destroy human embryos. They are, however, allowed to study cells that other, privately funded scientists have retrieved from spare human embryos discarded at fertility clinics, as long as proper permission has been granted by the mother and other ethics restrictions are followed.

The first applications for such research--and the first documentation from potential embryo-cell distributors assuring that their cells have been retrieved in accordance with the guidelines--were to be reviewed Wednesday by a newly formed committee, the human pluripotent stem-cell review group.

That changed, however, when NIH’s acting director, Ruth Kirschstein, received word from HHS to cancel the meeting.

An institute employee passed the word by telephone to the approximately dozen committee members, whose names NIH has refused to make public. According to one member reached Friday, no explanation was given for the cancellation and no hint was given as to whether or when it might be rescheduled.

“It’s unfortunate,” said the member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It certainly is holding up research that could potentially affect a lot of people with a number of different diseases. Time is being lost.”

The committee member said the group consisted of a wide range of scientific, ethical and theological expertise and opinion, including at least one “mainstream Catholic.”

Some opponents have argued that certain cells that can be obtained from adults may have the same potential as embryonic stem cells.

Doug Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said he supported the Bush administration’s review of the NIH guidelines. The Clinton administration opinion that it is legal to fund embryonic cell research is “not an opinion, it’s an evasion of the law,” Johnson said.

The law, in this case, is a rider that has been added annually to the appropriation bill for NIH that precludes funding of research that causes the destruction of embryos.

The legal question is whether that language is violated by funding research that does not itself involve the destruction of embryos but depends on their destruction by others as a source of cells.

According to the guidelines, cells can be used only if the embryos were going to be destroyed by parents anyway.