MO Woes

The anti-science forces in Missouri don’t know when to call it quits. This week a state judge decided to hear a lawsuit from the Missouri Roundtable for Life that seeks to block $21 million of state funds from going to the state’s Life Sciences Research Board. The hearing will take place on October 20th.

Just last month, a judge in Cole County, MO denied a request from the Missouri Roundtable for Life for a temporary restraining order that would prevent state money from going to the Life Science Research Board for 15 days while the state clarifies the law. The Roundtable fears that the money might go towards abortions, cloning, or embryonic stem cell research since the law is unclear about the restrictions placed on the funds.

The Life Science Research Board was created by state legislation in 2003 and was charged with distributing funds in the Life Sciences Research Trust Fund. According to the law, the trust fund is supposed to receive 25 percent of the money that the state received from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreeement. The intention of the law was to ensure that the legislature appropriates that 25 percent of that continuous tobacco revenue stream every year starting in FY 2007. The LSRB, however, is just starting to receive applications and will not make any grants until FY 2009.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Human embryonic stem cells.

The problem that anti-science advocates have is that Amendment 2, which protects embryonic stem cell research in MO, was passed in 2006 and may “loosen” the restrictions on cloning and abortion that were originally put on the funding. That is why there was a major struggle in the state legislature this year regarding the appropriations. The final wording of the appropriations bill stated that the research should be done “exclusively on animal science, plant science, medical devices, biomaterials and composite research, diagnostics, nanotechnology related to drug development and delivery, clinical imaging, and information technology related to human health,” according to the Associated Press. But Amendment 2 has a clause in it that prohibits state officials from withholding research funds for purposes other than stem cell research simply because those officials want to inhibit the conduct of human embryonic stem cell research. In other words, crafters of the legislation did not want scientists or institutions denied funding for other purposes simply because they might have an association with hESC research.

Edward Martin, the Roundtable’s attorney, expressed the group’s concern about the uncertainty surrounding the funds. “We’re asking for the court to say what the law is,” he told the Daily Record and the Kansas City Daily News-Press after the July hearing.

State attorneys, however, denied that the funds would be used for any of the procedures that the Roundtable is concerned about, like human cloning and abortion.

What’s interesting is that Amendment 2 says nothing about abortion and still prohibits human cloning just like the original restrictions put on the LSRB. What the Roundtable is probably concerned about is the contested definition of “cloning,” which Amendment 2 defines as an effort “to implant in a uterus or attempt to implant in a uterus anything other than the product of fertilization of an egg of a human female by a sperm of a human male for the purpose of initiating a pregnancy that could result in the creation of a human fetus, or the birth of a human being.”

Note that this does not ban somatic cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, which is a technique that scientists are working on to create stem cells that are a genetic match for a donor. In this process, the blastocyst is not implanted and cannot even have cells removed from it after 14 days. The Roundtable’s hope is that the original LSRB restriction included both therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and that it will take precedent over Amendment 2. This is just the latest in a long line of petty stem cell squabbles.

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