In the House, Rep, King Banaian (R-St. Cloud) moved to amend the higher education bill with language banning SCNT, calling it “human cloning.”

“This is simply concerned with the funding of research into this. It is not an outright ban,” he said on the floor. “It does not ban a state institution doing it if it was able to find private funding to do so.”

In the Senate, the higher education bill was similarly amended in committee by Sen. Michelle Fischbach (R-Paynesville), whose husband, Scott Fischbach is executive director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, which has lobbied for the ban.

DFLers on the Senate floor objected to the provision saying it would prevent important therapeutic research from happening in Minnesota.

“The effect of that would be very significant for our economy and jobs, and very significant for the potential to control or cure very sign diseases that affect all of our families,” said Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park).

He said proponents of the bill weren’t being completely honest about its true motivations.

“It’s the agenda of [Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life] and the pro-life movement to move the line of where human conception begins,” said Latz. “I respect those who sincerely hold those beliefs, but we ought to be having it on terms that we understand that it’s not hiding behind scientific language when that’s not really what it’s doing.”

DFLers moved to amend the bill to have it ban the creation of human clones and to allow for therapeutic research.

Sen. John Marty (DFL-Roseville) said, “If you want to ban cloning but don’t want to stop the medical research, vote for the amendment, but don’t be pretending you want to do it because you want to ban human cloning.”

Those amendments were defeated.

Gov. Dayton wrote Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch on Tuesday stating that like his predecessor, Republican Tim Pawlenty, he would likely send back bills that contained “extraneous policy” proposals that didn’t relate to the budget.

And Dayton’s commissioner of higher education, Sheila Wright, specifically called out the stem cell ban in a letter to Republican leadership.

“Language regarding Human Cloning is moving in a separate bill and should continue to do so,” wrote Wright. “Any policy provisions not tied to the budget should be removed so we can focus on the budget.”

Dr. Hans Keirstead of the University of California Irvine is in negotiations with the Food and Drug Administration to conduct the first ever trials using embryonic stem cells to improve function in people with spinal cord injuries. While the therapy is promising, patients will also have to take anti-rejection drugs to prevent the body from attacking the stem cells. But Keirstead has another plan: Use somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create stem cells out of the patients’ own cells, ensuring that their bodies won’t reject them. In California such research is legal even though human cloning is expressly banned; legislators in Minnesota want to make that research a crime along with human cloning.

Keirstad and his research teams are pioneers in the field of stem cell research. They found a way several years ago to program stem cells to replicate as neural cells — the kind damaged in spinal cord injuries — at a high rate of purity. The embryonic stem cells his lab created are from existing stem cell lines which were created from discarded embryos from fertility clinics.

Those stem cells won’t match spinal cord injury patients’ own cells, and their bodies will reject the cells unless they take long-term courses of drugs to prevent their own immune system from attacking what could be an effective treatment.

Using SCNT, Keirstad hopes to create stem cells that match each individual patient. By taking cells from the patient’s skin or other part of the body and injecting them into a human egg, researchers can create stem cells that match the patient perfectly.

That’s what Minnesota’s proposed bill would criminalize, and it’s what the anti-abortion rights group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life calls “human cloning.”

But the bill goes even further as Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park) noted in Monday’s Higher Education Committee meeting.

Criminalizing patients?

“This bill makes it a crime not only to engage in that particular form of scientific conduct, but also to ship or receive or import any aggregation of cells that would meet this definition including, I suppose, if a person were to travel out of state and receive therapy that was created… created using this method of science and attempt to return to the state would be guilty of importing those cells and committing a crime simply by coming to Minnesota,” he said.

The Minnesota Independent spoke with several experts to ascertain if that would indeed be the case.

“Laws have been interpreted that way, but it’s a matter of opinion the courts will have to decide,” said Don Gibbons of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He added that it’s hard to say for sure, since it’s up to law enforcement and the court system to determine application of the law.

Asked if the bill would criminalize travel into the state by patients participating in SCNT research, Michael Werner of the Washington, D.C.–based Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, said, “Well, it certainly could. This type of bill doesn’t account for a number of variables.”

“We don’t know where the next scientific discovery is going to come from whether it’s induced pluripotent stem cells, embryonic stem cells, umbilical cord cells or SCNT.”

He gave a scenario where a researcher might use SCNT to develop a certain kind of cell, and then that cell was altered or refined to create a treatment for a specific disease.

“Would that treatment still be a considered a product of SCNT?” Warner asked. “How many steps removed does the product stop being SCNT-derived? What if this technology led to other discoveries would treatments devired from those discoveries be available?”

He added, “The process of scientific discovery builds on itself.”

Lost research dollars

Dr. John Wagner of the University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute told members of the Senate Higher Education Committee that the bill could cost the state in lost research funding.

“I think that, to be conservative, on the cheap end, would be hundreds of millions of dollars. There is a lot of work to get there, but the potential is massive,” he said.

Those numbers are in line with what market experts estimate. In one study in the publication Regenerative Medicine Cell Therapies, cell-based research alone generated millions in 2010. “We estimate from the cumulative numbers of units manufactured and patients treated as well as from discussions with senior industry experts, that the current value of the regenerative medicine cell therapy market is presently in the order of $100–200 million per annum,” the report’s authors wrote.

A 2010 memo from MaRS Advisory Services, a market research company based in Canada, stated that “2009 estimates approximate that the stem cell market (including blood cord banking and drug development tools) will achieve an annual growth of 29.2% resulting in sales of $11 billion by 2020.”

None of the organizations contacted by the Minnesota Independent would offer an estimate of how much a ban on SCNT would cost Minnesota in the long-term.

If passed into law, the ban could also mean top researchers leave the state to work at universities where such research is permitted. “I’ve been approached by Stanford,” Wagner said. “The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is putting out an RFA to recruit people from other states.”

Sen. Latz asked him if that was before or after the bill was introduced.

Wagner responded, “Both.”

Huge potential

SCNT has not yet been successful in the lab, but there’s a consensus among stem cell researchers that it has huge potential.

A working group of stem cell researchers from around the world met last summer to discuss the future of the technique and they concluded that the research is vital:

Given that our knowledge of reprogramming is in its infancy, it is still possible that hSCNT will emerge as the technology of choice for specific human stem cell therapies or for developing particular disease models. A further reason to continue hSCNT research rests in its potential to shed light on the earliest stages of human development. Even the first few events after fertilization differ among species (Haaf, 2006), and increasing evidence suggests that subtle defects in these early stages of development can have serious repercussions on health and viability (Reefhuis, et al., 2009). Although some of these events can be studied using other in vitro models, hSCNT could be particularly useful for understanding the influence of genetic background on early development and help us understand environmental and genetic contributions to developmental disorders.

Because of that potential, the Minnesota Medical Association and the University of Minnesota have come out strongly against the proposed bill.

The bill — sponsored by 31 House Republicans and three House DFLers and five Senate Republicans — passed through key committees in both chambers within the past week and currently awaits a vote on the Senate floor.

With the 100-day anniversary just one week away, it’s notable that almost all of Obama’s accomplishments so far have been rhetorical, rather than policy-based.

Let’s see … there was the passage of the stimulus bill, the passage of the SCHIP bill, the Afghan surge, the various abortion and stem cell executive orders, etc. and etc.

Now, there have been high-profile setbacks, like the Employee Free Choice Act stalemate and the slow-walking of health care as (in part) a function of President Obama’s troubled nominees, and a case can be made that President George W. Bush had a better first 100 days (the Jim Jeffords switch did not happen until May), but any attempt to equate Obama’s huge rhetorical PR blitzes with a lack of accomplishments is sort of foolish. Republicans are getting rolled on most of the president’s priorities.

During an interview today on Dobson’s radio program, Palin said she believes, from the bottom of her heart, that McCain supports these elements of the platform. Here’s the transcript:

[DOBSON]: …But I am telling you the Republican platform is the strongest pro-life, pro-family document to come out of a political party. Even more so than the platforms during the campaigns of Ronald Reagan. There are principles there that just, I’ve been fighting for, for 30-40 years and you are trying to articulate those same principles, aren’t you?

[PALIN] Absolutely. And Dr. Dobson thank you so much for recognizing that. This is a strong platform. [inaudible] around the planks in this platform that respect life and respect the entrepreneurial spirit of this great country. And those things, back to the social issues that are what Republicans at least in the past had articulated and tried to stand on. Now finally we have very solid planks in the platform that will allow us to build an even stronger foundation for our country. It is all good and it is encouraging, you would maybe have assumed people would have, that we would have gotten further away from those strong planks. But no, they are there, they are solid, we stand on them and again I believe that it is the right agenda for the country at this time. Very, very clear and contrasted tickets in this election, November 4th. People are going to see the clear contrast, just go to the planks in our platform and that is where you see them.

[DOBSON] In your private conversations with Sen. McCain, is it your impression that he also strongly supports those views? I know that he did not oppose that platform when it was written. Do you think he will implement it?

[PALIN] I do, from the bottom of my heart. I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details too, about the different planks and what they represent. And I’m very heartened that John McCain, he doesn’t want a vice president who will check the opinions of me at the door and we talk about some of these. And they are very important. It’s most important though, as you are suggesting that Americans know that John McCain is solidly there on those solid planks in our platform that build the right agenda for America.

Ambinder suggests that one of three things are possible:

Either Palin is trying to mislead Dobson, equivocate or perhaps he doesn’t know what her running mate believes. McCain opposes a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage…. He supports embryonic stem cell research…he opposes a constitutional amendment banning all abortion. Read the platform for yourself:   On abortion… on gay marriage… on stem cells.. .

Maybe McCain changed his mind?

I would offer a fourth possibility: Palin hasn’t read the Republican Party platform and therefore is just winging it with Dobson.

Palin’s rambling, superlative-laden responses sound eerily similar to her rambling, superlative-laden responses to questions posed during her interviews with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’ Katie Couric, in which she clearly was winging it.

Here is an example, from Palin’s answer to a question from Gibson about whether she believes the Iraq war was part of “God’s plan.”

I believe that there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good. I believe that there is great hope and great potential for every country to be able to live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie, and I believe that those are the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That, in my world view, is a grand — the grand plan.

I’m not knocking her for not having read the Republican Party platform. I haven’t read it either. However, it’s probably a good idea to err on the side of caution, rather than to wholeheartedly affirm someone else’s position on something she is unfamiliar with.