Lawmakers fire back at Varmus

WASHINGTON - If NIH Director Harold Varmus thought that anti-abortion activists and their friends in Congress would be pacified by an artfully worded legal opinion indicating that the government can fund research on human stem cells, he learned last week that he was wrong. Instead, it has energized opponents of embryo research.

see BioCentury Extra, Jan. 20). In testimony to a Senate panel, Varmus argued that "the statutory prohibition on human embryo research does not apply to research utilizing human pluripotent stem cells because human pluripotent stem cells are not embryos."...