• It's true, it's true...

Posted: November 3, 2010

“It’s true, it’s true
the Crown has made it clear
the climate must be perfect all the year..”

Camelot

After listening to (a seemingly) endless stream of political promises (close to that cited above) the election is finally over, and Washington will return to the gridlock from whence it came before the election. Nothing will change. The Senate would not or could not pass anything that the House proposed before, and that will be the case for the next two years. The yelling about who is to blame will be a little different, but the end results will be the same.

This is of course, the good news or the bad news depending on which side of the aisle you sit on. At Neuralstem, we sit in the gallery seats with the care givers and patients who suffer from incurable and/or degenerative central nervous system diseases and injuries. From our seats, the election was calmer, but not uneventful.

There is still strong support for stem cell research (of all types) in the public at large, and nothing in this election signals a change in that position. Indeed, in Colorado, an extremely conservative “tea party” challenger is running very strong (at the time of this writing the election is too close to call), and there was also a thinly disguised anti stem cell proposition on the ballot. Yet the State proposition to expand the definition of “personhood” back to conception, went down to a clear defeat. And as a coda the staunchest opponent of stem cell research in the Senate, (Brownback from Kansas) retired from the Senate to run for (and become) Governor of his state.

It is likely that no new legislation will be enacted in the “lame duck” Congress, or the newly elected Congress. So omnibus bills will undoubtedly be passed to simply keep the government going for the next two years, sort of “as is”. A defense budget might be the only exception. I would not expect any anti stem cell proposals to get through the Senate and/or a White House veto, even if they did get through the House. Now, the probable lack of actual Agency budgets (the location of most legislative mischief) will act as an additional bar to such threats.

The attacks will continue, new propositions will come up in various States, new law suits will be filed, and politicians will do what they do. But here at least, the truth is clear now. Human trials conducted by Neuralstem and by others are already underway for spinal cord injury, ALS, Batten’s disease; and in the next year undoubtedly Stroke, Macular Degeneration and many more. And soon Neuralstem will file the world’s first IND for a drug (to treat depression) discovered by screening against our neural stem cells in the lab. Through all the noise it is now clear that stem cell science can enable important, ethical, practical medicine that promises to offer help and hope where none now exists for millions of suffering patients and their families through out the world. It will not be legislated away.