I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
In a major breakthrough that would have been impossible two years ago, researchers from the University of Michigan have created the first embryonic stem cell line developed in this state. The find was to be announced at this weekend’s World Stem Cell Summit in Detroit. The Detroit Free Press reports:
It’s a long way from curing disease, but it’s a “big step forward” to creating new lines for research on specific diseases, said Gary Smith, who derived the line. “This is going from zero to 50 (m.p.h.).”
The cells in the line can replicate for a nearly endless supply of embryonic stem cell tissue for research. If the line is approved by the National Institutes of Health, it could be placed on the national registry of lines provided by the likes of Harvard and the New York University School of Medicine.
The approval process could take months, but Smith said he’s not worried. The mass of cells, which began as a surplus human embryo and is known as UM4-6, has undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny and extensive ethics review by the university’s research board.
They began with only 30 cells and have managed to make them reproduce into millions of identical cells without maturing beyond the embryonic stage, which is the key to being able to use the cells for medical research. Embryonic stem cells can be coaxed to form nearly any kind of adult tissue when handled correctly in the lab.
In 2008 voters in Michigan passed referendum legalizing embryonic stem cell research. Prior to that, university researchers had to go out of state to do any work on embryonic stem cells.
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