Vatican City, Nov 8, 2011 / 11:16 am
At the Vatican today, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson urged President Obama to establish a commission to support adult stem cell research.
“I want President Obama to bring all this adult stem cell research together,” Thompson told CNA in Rome on Nov. 7.
Thompson says he wants a body created within the National Institutes of Health that will “be able to use the resources that we have in America to really put regenerative medicine into the forefront of therapies creating new breakthroughs in disease control.”
Thompson is in Rome for a three-day conference jointly organized by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture and the U.S.-based Stem for Life Foundation which promotes adult stem cell research. He will be joined by over 350 other policy makers, medical experts, educators and religious leaders.
Thompson who is a former governor of Wisconsin and planning to run for the U.S. Senate, outlined how a presidential commission could work.
The commission would bring together “private sector business leaders,” who would then “evaluate all of the federal efforts to date surrounding regenerative medicine,” he said. That group would also make “specific recommendations to our president on how we can better coordinate these efforts and unite them with the best of private enterprise.” He noted, however, that “to date, nothing has been done,” by the Obama administration.