Fetal research uproar: It seems some HHS & NIH officials are making decisions for the Trump admin for using aborted fetal tissue for research. There’s a lot of money to be made with aborted babies.

NIH official commits to continued funding for some fetal tissue research By Amy Goldstein. December 19, 2018

The National Institutes of Health pledged Tuesday at a private meeting of scientists who use fetal tissue that the government’s largest funder of biomedical research would continue to support such work despite a conservative broadside against it.

The commitment by top Health and Human Services and NIH officials to continue funding for researchers who work for nongovernment labs came at the end of a seven-hour meeting with about 40 scientists from around the country, according to three participants.

Scientists were part of an invitation-only workshop to evaluate the politically loaded question of whether adequate alternatives exist to fetal tissue in studies pursuing treatment and possible cures for such diseases as HIV, Zika and cancers. The workshop was part of a broad audit being conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, as antiabortion activists and other social conservatives reactivate a years-old opposition to it.

One of the scientists, Stanford University researcher Irving Weissman, who participated remotely, pressed officials about their intentions. “I want to know the bottom line” about future funds, Weissman recounted in an interview afterward. Brett Giroir, HHS’s assistant secretary for health, replied that, at least for grants and contracts for researchers employed by universities and nongovernment labs, there will be no pause as long as experiments comply with the ethical guidelines of their universities and the federal government, as well as state laws.

The future of NIH’s spending on fetal tissue research in its own labs sounded less clear, according to the participants. At one point,

Giroir, who has played a lead role in the fetal tissue reconsideration, told the scientists that the question was still being reviewed. Giroir said that any alternative sources of tissue “must be as predictive, as reliable and as validated as existing models” that use fetal tissue. another participant, Mike McCune, a longtime HIV researcher who is a senior adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

NIH officials summarized the discussion. “There was strong opinion that work should proceed on a variety of models derived with fetal tissues or from alternative sources,” it said, adding the synopsis “is not intended to pre-judge the outcome of the HHS audit.”

The gathering at NIH’s was convened as the Trump admin is being pressed by conservative members of Congress and conservative organizations aligned with the president to end government support for research that implants snippets of tissue from elective abortions into mice for laboratory studies.

Though HHS officials have said repeatedly that no changes to funding policy would be made until the audit is completed, the administration has taken actions lately that have stoked researchers’ fears. In September, it ended a small contract with a California firm that supplies scientists with the tissue. Federal officials told the lead researcher at an NIH lab in Montana that he could not procure fetal tissue for his longtime work on HIV.

Early this month, NIH decided not to extend for another year a long-term contract with a lab at the University of California at San Francisco that uses fetal tissue in mouse studies of promising HIV therapies. NIH then pivoted and gave the university a 90-day extension.

The Montana researcher, Kim Hasenkrug, attended Monday’s workshop. He has been forbidden by federal officials to discuss his lab’s funding, but other participants said officials told Hasenkrug they would continue to support his work.

Rotrosen also said that the 90-day extension would be lifted from the UCSF lab and that its funding would continue as long as the work met NIH rules and the university’s informed-consent guidelines.

NIH this month issued a notice that it will devote $20 million to research trying to advance alternative models to fetal tissue.

Antiabortion activists, meanwhile, sought to ratchet up pressure on NIH. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List, said that officials “have jumped ahead of the administration’s ongoing audit process.”

Others renewed calls for the institutes’ director, Francis Collins, (a Christian) to resign following reports he had told an NIH advisory committee that fetal tissue research would remain “a mainstay.”

Fetal Stem cells have proven to be disastrous in use for cures if illness but they are still used on multiple studies, universities, research etc. scientists basically scavage the babies body for all they Mad Scientist Research. Examples of failures for cures

History of Fetal Tissue Research and Transplants

Charlotte Lozier Institute | July 27, 2015.

Human fetal tissue research has gone on for decades. However, the success of fetal tissue transplants has been meager at best, and ethically-derived alternatives exist and are coming to dominate the field.

Proponents of using fetal tissue from induced abortion point to three areas in claims of the need for harvesting tissue:

-Transplantation to treat diseases and injuries

-Vaccine development

-Basic biology research

Fetal Tissue Transplantation: The first recorded fetal tissue transplants were in 1921 in the UK, in a failed attempt to treat Addison’s disease,[1] and in 1928 in Italy, in a failed attempt to treat cancer.[2] The first fetal tissue transplant in the U.S. was in 1939, using fetal pancreatic tissue in an attempt to treat diabetes. That attempt also failed, as did subsequent similar fetal tissue transplants in 1959. Between 1970 and 1991 approximately 1,500 people received fetal pancreatic tissue transplants in attempts to treat diabetes, mostly in the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Up to 24 fetuses were used per transplant, but less than 2% of patients responded.[3] Today, patients take insulin shots and pharmaceuticals to control their diabetes, and adult stem cell transplants have shown success at ameliorating the condition.[4]

Between 1960 and 1990, numerous attempts were made to transplant fetal liver and thymus for various conditions. According to one review, “the clinical results and patient survival rates were largely dismal.”[5] Conditions such as anemias and immunodeficiencies, for which fetal tissue attempts largely failed, are now treated routinely with adult stem cells, including umbilical cord blood stem cells,[6] even while the patient is still in the womb.[7]

Note that fetal tissue has been taken in a number of cases from fetuses at developmental ages where fetal surgery is now used to correct problems and save lives, and at stages where science now demonstrates that the unborn fetus can feel pain.

Between 1988 and 1994, roughly 140 Parkinson’s disease patients received fetal tissue (up to six fetuses per patient), with varying results.[8] Subsequent reports showed that severe problems developed from fetal tissue transplants. One patient who received transplant of fetal brain tissue (from a total of 3 fetuses) died subsequently, and at autopsy was found to have various non-brain tissues (e.g, skin-like tissue, hair, cartilage, and other tissue nodules) growing in his brain.[9]

In 2001, the first report of a full clinical trial[10] (funded by NIH) using fetal tissue for Parkinson’s patients was prominently featured in the New York Times,[11] with doctors’ descriptions of patients writhing, twisting, and jerking with uncontrollable movements; the doctors called the results “absolutely devastating”, “tragic, catastrophic”, and labeled the results “a real nightmare.”

A second large, controlled study published in 2003 showed similar results (funded by NIH), with over half of the patients developing potentially disabling tremors caused by the fetal brain tissue transplants.[12] The results of these two large studies led to a moratorium on fetal tissue transplants for Parkinson’s. Long-term follow-up of a few of the patients in these large studies showed that even in fetal tissue that grew in patients’ brains, the grafted tissue took on signs of the disease and were not effective.[13] In contrast, adult stem cells have shown initial success in alleviating Parkinson’s symptoms.[14]

A recent 2009 report emphasizes the instability and danger of fetal tissue transplants. A patient with Huntington’s disease was recruited into a study (funded by NIH) in which she had fetal brain cells injected into her brain. She did not improve, and instead developed in her brain a growing mass of tissue, euphemistically termed “graft overgrowth” by the researchers.[15]

Disastrous results for patients are seen not only with fetal tissue but also with fetal stem cells. In a recent example, a young boy developed tumors on his spine, resulting from fetal stem cells injected into his body.[16]

In contrast, a recent review found that as of December 2012, over one million patients had been treated with adult stem cells.[17] The review only addressed hematopoietic (blood-forming) adult stem cells, not other adult stem cell types and transplants, so this is a significant underestimate of the number of patients who have benefitted from adult stem cell therapies.