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The following timeline presents a concise history of stem cell research. (FIGURE 147)
The following timeline presents a concise history of stem cell research. (FIGURE 147)
Stem Cell Research has greatly evolved over the years. Their history holds various great achievements and contradictions. See the timeline below for more information.
1961: Dr. Ernest McCulloch, along with James E. Till discovers stem cells while doing research on bone marrow transplants in mice.
January 1973: The Department of Health and Human Services temporarily delays the use of federal funds of research using live embryos. This action was caused by the Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade.
July 12 1974: The 93rd Congress establishes a temporary ban on ALL federal funding on fetal tissue research. On the same day the Nation Commission is established for “the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research within DHEW to define policy for protection of human subjects during medical or scientific experiments.”
July 1975: The moratorium on embryonic research is lifted and the Department of Health and Human Services approves the National Commissions guidelines.
May 1979: The Ethics Advisory Board’s recommendation to support and federally fund an inspection of the safety in vitro fertilization is denied by the Health and Human Services.
December 1988: The Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel have a vote that results in 18-3 on the topic of approving federal funds for embryonic research, going off the fact that abortions aren’t morally affected by fetal tissue.
January 1975: The National Commission issues ethical guidelines for federal funding of fetal cell research and establishes the national Ethics Advisory Board.
FIGURE 151: The seal of the US Congress
1981: In the University of California, Gail Martin isolates the first embryonic stem cells in mice. Later in the year, scientists from the University of Cambridge replicate her results.
January 1980: President Reagan disbands the Ethics Advisory Board, it is never replaced.
March 1988: The Health and Human Services denies the funding request because of ethical issues. The main issue is that abortion would basically be encouraged. The National Institutes of Health respond by creating the Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel.
October 1987: The National Institutes of Health are asking to be funded for research fetal neural cells to aid in curing Parkinson’s disease.
November 1989: Even though the majority of the vote is 1988 was 18-3, the three who were against funding argue once again of the morality of abortion and are able to temporarily ban research on this topic.
January 1990: Congress votes to remove the temporary ban of research; however President H. W. Bush vetoes this movement.
January 1993: The ban of federal funding for human embryonic research is lifted by an executive order from President Bill Clinton. At the same time the NIH publish a new set of guidelines for federal funding.
November 1995: In the University of Wisconsin, scientists isolate embryonic stem cells from primates, showing that stem cells can also be isolated from humans.
January 6 1996: Congress passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, in which Jay Dickey and Roger Wicker argues against funding research in which human embryos were created and then destroyed for the purpose of stem cells.
November 5 1998: Scientists in the University of Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins University both were able to isolate embryonic stem cells from humans.
April 1999: An oversight committee for drafting guidelines for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is created.
June 1999: The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has a vote on whether federally funded labs should be able to take cells from human embryos and conduct research on them, in which the majority vote yes, they should.
August 23 2000: The National Institutes of Health along with approval from President Bill Clinton release guidelines for the use of federal funds in embryonic stem-cell research.
February 2001: Stem-cell research is placed on temporary hold to review the NIH guidelines, requested by President George W. Bush.
July 18, 2001: Senators Bill Frist and Orrin Hatch request federal funds for stem cell research to be limited.
August 9 2001: Bush passes an executive order further limiting research on stem cells by preventing the creation of additional embryonic stem cell lines to add to the 22 in existence at the time. Federal funds were confined for use only in stem cell lines already in existence.
November 25 2001: Therapeutic cloning is successfully completed and human embryos are cloned, done at Advanced Cell Technology.
September 2002: California passes a law that allows embryonic stem cell along with cloned embryo research even with Bush’s policy.
February 12 2004: Scientists in South Korea proclaim to have cloned the first human embryo, their work being published in Science.
June 25 2004: The new Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey receives a startup fund of $9.5 million dollars from New Jersey legislators.
November 2 2004: Preposition 71 is approved in California, granting the state permission to fund 3 billion dollars into embryonic stem cell research over the next 10 years.
May 24 2005: The House of Representatives passes a bill that alleviates some of the restrictions Bush had placed on the federal funding of stem cell research.
April 26 2005: The National Academies publishes their “Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.”
May 31 2005: Embryonic stem cell research in Connecticut receives $100 million dollars for funds for the next 10 years.
August 21 2005: At Harvard University scientists reveal the possibility of going from somatic skin cells to embryonic stem cells through conversion.
September 19 2005: Human neural stem cells were reported to have helped restore health to mice that had damaged spinal cords by Californian scientists.
December 15 2005: The scientists whose report of cloning a human embryo in 2004 were shown to have had fabricated data and had asked Science to retract their article of cloning a human embryo.
December 16 2005: New Jersey begins to finance human embryonic stem cell research.
April 6 2006: Embryonic stem cell research also begins in Maryland, with Governor Robert Ehrlich signing the Maryland Stem Cell Research Act.
July 19 2006: President Bush vetoes a plausible bill in which embryonic stem cells would have been federally funded.
August 23 2006: A new, potential technique to remove cells from a human embryo without harming the egg is announced at the Advanced Cell Technology Company.
November 7 2006: Voters in Missouri show majority support for a constitutional amendment that would protect embryonic stem cell research.
December 21 2006: The “Guidelines for the Conduct of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research” is publicized by the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
(FIGURE 179)
January 7 2007: Scientists from Wake Forest University and Harvard University announce that stem cells derived from donated amniotic fluid could potentially replace embryonic stem cells, as they could also differentiate into many other cells.
January 11 2007: The House of Representatives passes another bill to federally fund embryonic stem cell research; however there was not enough votes to override Bush’s presidential veto.
February 28 2007: Stem cell research in Iowa is allowed to create embryonic stem cells by the use of cloning, due the new legislation signed by Governor Chet Culver.
April 11 2007: Another bill from the Senate for further embryonic stem cell research is vetoed by Bush; however the vote was incredibly close to overriding the veto.
May 30 2007: UC Berkeley and Canada’s International Regulome Consortium agree to work together on stem cell research, receiving 30$ million dollars in grant money from the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research.
June 6 2007: A human skin cell is successfully modified into behaving like an embryonic stem cell. This work was done by scientists at Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts.
June 20 2007: Once again, Bush vetoes another bill that was passed through the House of Representatives, who wished to fund embryonic stem cell research.
November 14 2007: Stem cells were successfully derived from the cells of an adult monkey. This work was done by the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and was published in the journal Nature.
November 20 2007: Two teams in America and Japan announce a new method in isolating human skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells.
September 5 2008: The National Academies publish their updated “2008 Amendments to the National Academies’ Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.”
November 18 2008: Doctors are able to transplant a trachea developed using the patient’s bone marrow stem cells, so there wouldn’t be any rejection.
January 2009: The first clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells is approved by the FDA.
March 9 2009: Executive Order 13505 is issued by President Barack Obama, formally removing the stem cell research ban.
November 2009: Scientists in Japan find skin cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells.
June 9 2009: A study shows that acute myeloid leukemia patients have a higher survival rate by having stem cell transplants, shown in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
December 2009: At long last new stem cell lines are approved into the NIH list, allowing new lines to be used for research.
March 2010: Orphan drug status is granted to embryonic stem cell therapies by the FDA. An orphan drug is defined by the FDA as intended for the safe and effective treatment, diagnosis or prevention of rare diseases/disorders that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S., or that affect more than 200,000 persons but are not expected to recover the costs of developing and marketing a treatment drug.
August-September 2010: A temporary ban is placed on using NIH grant money on embryonic stem cells due to it being a violation of the Dickey-Wicker amendment by Federal Judge Royce Lamberth. However, the 131$ million dollars in grants already given out will be unaffected by the claim, and new grants waiting for approval will be placed on hold. In addition, intramural researchers doing work on embryonic stem cells are instructed to put their experiments on hold, until the Department of Justice appeals the new ban. The result of the appeal is a bil (S. 3766) that entails NIH funding to go toward embryonic stem cell research whose stem cells come from the original 22 lines.
November 22 2010: The FDA gives the okay to a second set of clinical trials for stem cell technology.
December 14 2010: The CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, William Caldwell IV, suddenly dies, leaving no successor.
February 9 2011: The CEO of Geron Corporation, Thomas B. Okarma resigns. Geron Corp. is a stem cell research giant who has been recently making deals to introduce potential therapies.
July 7 2011: At the University of Toronto, researchers form a process to locate hematopoietic stem cells, cells that can reconstruct bone marrow and other types of blood cells, derived from a person’s existing cells.
July 8 2011: A synthetic trachea made of “polymeric nanocomposite material” was coated with a patient’s stem cells and then inserted into the said patient.
July 27 2011: The lawsuit that led to the temporary banning of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research derived from new stem cell lines is finally dismissed by Judge Royce Lamberth, the same man who started it
October 5 2011: The first of its kind, a human embryonic stem cell was successfully cloned in the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory, although they do contain an extra set of chromosomes.
January 25 2012: Two women, both having different kinds of eye degeneration were successfully treated using embryonic stem cells. They were reported to having improved vision and no prominent side effects.
February 13 2012: Researchers from the University of Queensland have provided a way to transform regular stem cells into mesenchymal stem cells, which were usually derived from “invasive bone marrow transplants.” Through this new technique, the invasive procedure can be avoided, and there is also no need for matching donor types.
February 18 2012: Researchers from the University of California were able to “isolate adult heart stem cells, culture them to produce many more and then regraft them back into a mouse heart that had experienced a heart attack. The cells differentiated and smoothed scaring and strengthened heart function.”
