Save the embryo – kill the man!
The Ministry of Health opposed the "laboratory plantations of embryos"
Copper newsThe new law on cellular technologies will prohibit the use of fetal tissue to produce stem cells.
This was told by the Deputy head of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation Veronika Skvortsova in her blog on the ministry's website, speaking out against the "unscrupulous criticism" of the bill by some media and bloggers.
According to the deputy minister, the new law allows the use of stem cells of organs accompanying the fetus, such as the umbilical cord and fetal membranes (in principle, these organs are part of the fetus, but do not remain with it after birth). The embryo itself will be banned for these purposes in order to prevent the appearance of "laboratory embryo plantations" in which 4-6-day-old embryos are "disassembled into cells".
To critics of the bill, Skvortsova said that this document for the first time regulates the development, preclinical research, expertise, clinical research, monitoring of the use and circulation of cellular technologies. Each stage of these processes will receive a time frame and will be available for observation on a special Internet resource.
In addition, the new law is intended to officially introduce cellular technologies into mass medicine, while protecting donors and recipients from "unscrupulous clinics taking advantage of gaps in legislation," the deputy minister claims.
The draft federal law "On Biomedical Cell Technologies" was posted on the website of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation on December 6. It is planned to submit it to the Government for consideration by the end of 2010. If the new law is adopted, it will come into force on September 1, 2011.
The best comment on this article (according to the editorial board of "Mednovosti")I.
Maybe you shouldn't throw around epithets like “dirty"? The bill is no good, and its criticism is well-founded.
Example of a logical blunder:
Article 4.:
1) biomedical cell technology – the process of obtaining a cellular product …
2) cell product – a product resulting from the use of biomedical cell technology, …
That is, (1) is explained through (2), and (2) through (1). The meaning of the terms is clear, but in legal documents – especially laws – such logical “loops” are unacceptable, since formally they create the possibility of arbitrary interpretation.
The interpretation of the Law is actually carried out by the “federal state budgetary institution of the authorized federal executive authority,” and it seems that the bill is specially drafted in such a way as to allow arbitrary interpretation. This is due to its high, as they say now, “bribe-taking”.
II. The absolute prohibition in Article 9 raises questions:
“It is not allowed to take human embryo and/or fetus cells for the preparation of cell lines intended for the development of biomedical cell technologies.”
For some mysterious reason, no one is seriously fighting abortions in our country, but the use of abortive cellular material that has shown the highest clinical effectiveness is considered completely unacceptable. Throwing away the most valuable material that could save lives for some reason is considered effective.
For the public, the bill is presented as a “ban on human cloning". Is someone trying to do this? (I don't take charlatans like Raelites into account) It is clear to any serious physician or biologist that now trying to produce REPRODUCTIVE cloning would be the height of idiocy. But therapeutic cloning is also prohibited, although options for obtaining ESCs without creating a full-fledged embryo are already being developed.
III. No one denies that cellular technologies – like any branch of medicine – should be regulated by Law. But the proposed bill, if adopted in this form, will bring great harm to Russian medical science, will cause its further lagging behind the world level (already catastrophic), will create an opportunity for arbitrary (and, in our conditions, inevitably corrupt) interpretation.
Finally, any transplantations and autotransplantations, including blood transfusions and autohemotherapy, will fall under the law, if it is adopted in this form. Thus, they will be extremely difficult.
In general, rather than complain about “unscrupulous criticism”, they would not offer such crude bills.
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15.12.2010