NIH reverses Trump-era restrictions on fetal-tissue research
16 APRIL 2021
The US National Institutes of Health will remove limits on government scientists and cancel a controversial grant-reviewing ethics panel.
Nidhi Subbaraman
The United States is reversing restrictions on fetal-tissue research set by former president Donald Trump’s administration, allowing government scientists to resume studies using the biological material, and cancelling an extra ethics review of grant proposals submitted by academic researchers.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the changes on 16 April. “That’s good news,” says Lawrence Goldstein, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was a member of the Trump-era board that carried out the additional ethics reviews. Researchers use fetal tissue, obtained from elective abortions, to study a range of conditions from infectious disease to human development, and say it is vital to studying some illnesses.
Some restrictions on fetal-tissue research still in place could continue to pose hurdles. For one, in 2019 the NIH began requiring that a literature review be added to grant proposals, which Goldstein says threatened to overtake the page limit on applications.
Irving Weissman, director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, at the Stanford School of Medicine in California, agrees. “You don't have enough space in any grant to do both the comprehensive review and anything you planned to do,” he says.
More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01035-6
