The NIH Faces Budget Cuts - and Needs Your Help!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled votes that will take place this week on two competing measures to provide funding for the rest of FY11.

One is the House-passed bill (H.R. 1), which cuts the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding by $1.6 billion.

The other is an alternative offered by Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Daniel Inouye (D-HI), which maintains the NIH budget at the FY10 level.

Congress still needs to hear from you! Contact your senators immediately and ask them to support the NIH as an urgent national priority by voting "yes" on the continuing resolution proposed by the Senate Appropriations Committee and "no" on H.R. 1. A sample letter for your use is located at http://capwiz.com/jscpp/home/ should you choose to email your elected official.

To take action on the CLS CapWiz page, simply type your zip code in the box to your right. You will be automatically directed to a sample letter. You can edit the letter and send it to your elected officials right from this site. We also encourage you to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you in advance for your participation!

Research on Cell Regeneration Highlighted in the New York Times

Two research reports published Friday offer novel approaches to the age-old dream of regenerating the body from its own cells. 

Animals like newts and zebra fish can regenerate limbs, fins, even part of the heart. If only people could do the same, amputees might grow new limbs and stricken hearts be coaxed to repair themselves. 

But humans have very little regenerative capacity, probably because of an evolutionary trade-off: suppressing cell growth reduced the risk of cancer, enabling humans to live longer. A person can renew his liver to some extent, and regrow a fingertip while very young, but not much more. 

In the first of the two new approaches, a research group at Stanford University led by Helen M. Blau, Jason H. Pomerantz and Kostandin V. Pajcini has taken a possible first step toward unlocking the human ability to regenerate. By inactivating two genes that work to suppress tumors, they got mouse muscle cells to revert to a younger state, start dividing and help repair tissue. 

See entire article here.