Working on Human Emryos While Listening to the Call to Prayer?

Imagine a scientist entering a lab, walls full with Arabic writing, he starts the day rising his hands to the sky praying to Allah, ” bismillahirrahmanirrahim, I start with the name of the god” he enters the cell culture room and checks his growing cells: Human embryonic stem cells! 

No, this is not a scene from a movie but the daily life of a researcher in Iran!  

After the toppling of the Shah in Iran, the nation has undergone a dramatic revolution. Despite the poor infrastructure, Iranian scientists accomplished to isolate six human and eight embryonic mouse stem cell (ESC) lines over the past decade. They subsequently successfully turned these cells into functional pancreatic, heart, splenic, and liver cells. It is a remarkable achievement that should be acknowledged in the sense that traditional society and conservative laws actually approve human embryonic stem cells research whereas many western societies recognize it as unethical.

In Quran, a human is considered alive 120 days after conception, therefore in Iran and other Islamic countries research involving embryos is relatively uncontroversial. Embryonic Stemcell Research is "definitely an area where Iran could become a player, given the funding restrictions in the US," Ali Khademhosseini, a biomedical engineer at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in Cambridge, Mass., who was born in Iran and studies the field in his native country, told The Scientist.  

On the other side, Obama agrees the ESC research bill almost like announcing the presence of competion. It seems like there will be another field of combat and contest (other than nuclear research) between Iran and U.S.

Mesopotomia is the cradle of many primary medical an mathematical research in the middle ages. Maybe the middle east is catching up after a late dark age as the Christian world had been experienced. Maybe, this is the start of a Middle Eastern Renaissance. 

FDA OKs Stem Cell Trials, but is Obama going to put his money where his mouth is?

We were all very pleased to hear that recently FDA sent the clearance to a Californian bio-tech company to begin trials for the world’s first (official!) clinical study on stem cell based therapy. Clinical studies will be initiated with up to 10 paralyzed patients due to spinal cord injury. 

Coincidentally, rumors say that Obama plans to reinitiate human embryonic stem cell research which has been frozen since the Bush administration. Right now, as in many countries, using an human embryonic cell line  derived after august 9 2001, is banned in the U.S. Obama and his key scientific advisers are better concerned about the contemporary challenges than I thought in the beginning, showing the green light to reverse Bush doctrine.

This is inextricably linked to the pro-medical staff he had taken on in his administration; White House Chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, Zeke (Ezekiel) Emanuel is a leading oncologist and director of the NIH’s (National Institute of Health) Bioethics department and a known pro-stem cell research medical interventionist.

However, this might not be sufficient to boost biotech research in America which is in the middle of a big (economic) crisis. When people are massively forced to abandon their homes lose their jobs and see their pension savings evaporate like snow to the sun, high cost lab work might seem like a luxury. Not surprisingly, budget cuts are expected and ‘less-efficient’ or ‘lower-impact’ (read: fundamental) research groups and facilities are likely to suffer most.

For all the praise and hardships this freshly formed government has already been exposed to, we are proponents of a don’t touch approach to government scientific research funding that secures the way to economic growth and to fuel novel breakthroughs in the combating of socially disastrous diseases that cost society billions of dollars in health care or indirect economic impact all around the world.