ESTOOLS - Advances with human embryonic stem cells - Difficulties faced by researchers

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Difficulties faced by researchers

Italian court rejects appeal against funding decision

In July 2009, Italian scientists who challenged their government’s decision to exclude embryonic stem cell research from a major funding call were told they have no right to appeal. This rejection of an appeal ny the scientists was upheld again in December 2009.

Read more at the EuroStemCell website

The first Court (Tribunal of Latium) in Italy on July 2009 rejected the appeal of the three scientists and said that the dean of a hospital or the rector of the university (and not the three scientists) had the right to appeal. According to this ruling the freedom and right of (legal) research, acknowledged by the Italian Constitution as an individual right, would  disappear. In December 2009, the second Court (State Council) questioned the legitimacy of their appeal on the grounds it was “defective of [the demonstration that] a research proposal [on hES cells] was prepared and submitted”. But the call for proposals itself had excluded such a submission, nevertheless one of the three appellants had prepared and submitted by the deadline. The second Court also said it is the content of the call itself that defines what can be funded. However the three scientists contend that the minister that opens such calls has no rights (and no competence) to exclude a type of research that is legal and pertinent to the field identified by the Government as “strategically relevant and to be financed”.

ESTOOLS Coordinator Peter Andrews has said "Peer-reviewed research, in which scientists make the key decisions about which projects to pursue, has been the bedrock of biological science over the past century. Its outcomes underpin much of modern medicine. I applaud this action by Elena Cattaneo and her colleagues in Italy in their fight to maintain this principle of academic freedom."

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Background

In July 2007 ESTOOLS drew attention, via a Call for Action, to the political and legislative environments governing the research that could be undertaken by participants in the project in Germany and Italy.

Since then the German parliament passed an amendment to the Stem Cell Act on 11 April 2008, but movement in Italy has not yet occurred. In the USA, President-Elect Obama has foreshadowed a lifting of the ban on the use of federal funds for research using human embryonic stem cells. Prof. Elena Cattaneo refers to this in a commentary «Perché lavoro con le embrionali» in Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore, published 16 November 2008. Below is a summary of the article. READ FULL ARTICLE translated into English.

ESTOOLS PI Elena Cattaneo starts the article with USA President-elect Obama’s possible opening of the door to federal funding of hESCs, and questions the moral basis of laws that forbid research on hESCs funded with public money at the same time as that is permitted with private money, as is the case in the USA. She says that a state declaring that it is against one area of research should simply ban such research from its soul. Cattaneo then proposes that Italian citizens should be told by elected politicians of further actions that would be consistent with the limitations imposed upon hESC research: a declaration that Italian citizens must not be permitted to benefit from any result or cure to emerge from any experiment that has used hESCs; a requirement that Italian scientists must follow a code of conduct that prevents any participation in meetings and international networks, or reading of articles in scientific journals, that may risk their "moral" research being contaminated with the results of such "impure” research. Cattaneo, a Christian, concludes with her personal belief in "the existence of a God more large than any earthbound imagination, who has no need to be asserted through dogmas. A God who allows women and men freely to think, hope, love, enjoy and hold beliefs having diverse own rhythms and forms. Who lets humanity, individually vested with consciences and ethical tensions, continue to grow (for those that are believers) the gift it has received. A God that perhaps nurtures some love for Science. Because it might be that a God who wants to keep us in the dark and in suffering does not exist"