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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 30 2015, @03:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-think-of-the-children? dept.

The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products.

In an unusual twist, the bill—introduced on June 17—would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM's analysis, which considers the ethics of creating embryos that have three genetic parents, was commissioned by the FDA.

The House legislation comes during a time of intense debate on such matters, sparked by the announcement in April that researchers in China had edited the genomes of human embryos. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) moved quickly to remind the public that a 1996 law prevents the federal government from funding work that destroys human embryos or creates them for research purposes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-congress-moves-to-block-human-embryo-editing/

[Source]: http://www.nature.com/news/us-congress-moves-to-block-human-embryo-editing-1.17858

We covered a related story, Three-Person Babies Could Be Possible in Two Years just over a year ago.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday June 30 2015, @04:43PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 30 2015, @04:43PM (#203363) Journal

    Our courts have actually been pretty forgiving of this class of infringement, much as I feel like it specifically sets out atheist views as worthless.

    The most recent case I can recall is the "faith based initiatives" of the Bush administration, where federal money for housing and urban development was re-channeled in a "non denominational" way to help people in need. How that actually turned out was tons of money was wasted on combining evangelism with that charity. And in at least one case, a bush-aligned pastor got over $1 million personally, with little oversight to where it went.

    It wasn't until 2 years later that an appeals court made the obvious decision and shut the program down.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:25PM (#203381)

    There's a homeless shelter in my area that gets government funding that forces people to go to a Christian Church as a mandatory condition of staying there. If that doesn't say "violation of rights" I don't know what does. This budding Christian theocracy overthrowing our constitutional form of government needs to be squashed as quickly as possible.

    • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:11PM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:11PM (#203447) Journal

      The “budding Christian theocracy” is only a symptom of the disease.

      A lot of times I wonder if the Masters of the Universe even follow a religion and if it has even a shred of Judeo-Christian mythology in it.

    • (Score: 2) by ah.clem on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:41PM

      by ah.clem (4241) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:41PM (#203494)

      This is an interesting statement - are you willing to provide the name of the org and the city it's located in, Anon? If the statement turns out to be accurate, I will certainly do followup research on this.