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At a time when US President George Bush is dead against stem cell research due to "moral reasons", California’s stem cell agency announced that it will be awarding $75 million research grants for various universities and nonprofit laboratories to fight against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases and additional stem cell research.
Announcing the grants, Zach Hall, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) said, "It's exciting to know that in over 100 labs in California we will have human embryonic stem cell research taking off in a big way because of these grants". In total over 29 scientific teams at 12 nonprofit institutes around the state were awarded grants to conduct different types of research.
Robert Klein, chairman of CIRM, said that they initially looked for institutes that were currently conducting research in human embryonic stem cells.
"We focused our initial grants on human embryonic stem cells specifically because human embryonic stem cell research receives minimal funding from the federal government, and even those funds are restricted to lines of questionable value. Going forward, we will support a diverse range of stem cell research projects", he added.
The latest grants take the total amount of spending on stem cell research to over $120 million in just two months. Klein said that the grants will be made available by June, which will make California a world leader in the funding of human embryonic stem cell research.
More than half of the grants were awarded to the University of California, with the grants given to five campuses totaling around $42 million. The UC San Francisco received seven grants, totaling $17.4 million, with the main aim being the growth of embryonic cells into a type of nerve cell that can correct the electrical activity of brain circuits in patients suffering from Parkinson's disease or epilepsy.
One of the other purpose of the grants is to try and develop the embryonic cells into brain cells that could regenerate the myelin sheath. This will be very helpful for patients who are suffering from multiple sclerosis and strokes.
Stanford University received around six grants worth $15.2 million. Other institutes who were awarded grants include Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, Los Angeles-based CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, UC San Francisco-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes, San Diego-based Salk Institute for Biological Studies, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC San Diego.
In 2001, stem cell research took a setback when President Bush passed a legislation limiting the amount of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, as such research would require the destruction of embryos. According to Bush, and other opponents of stem cell research, embryos are human life and destroying them would amount to the destruction of human life.
However many scientists and analysts believed that the move was politically motivated to win over religious groups and in November 2004, a new legislation to circumvent the limitation, was passed by over 59 percent of votes, but the legislation, known as Proposition 71, was soon dragged into legal problems.
Last April an Alameda County Superior Court judge said that stem cell research was
constitutional; a ruling that was upheld by an appellate court in San Francisco, but initiative challengers revealed that they will be appealing to the supreme court.
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