Life Links 2/6/09

The Tuscon Citizen has an article on how Planned Parenthood will be investigating the actions of one of their employees who failed to report the relationship of a girl claiming to be 15 and her 27-year-old boyfriend. The actions of the employee were taped by Lila Rose and Live Action Films using an undercover camera.

Spokeswoman Joline Nestor said Planned Parenthood is investigating and hopes to look at the whole video.

"We're not taking it lightly," Nestor said. "It's concerning to see something like this."

According to the Washington Times, President Obama will sign an executive order expanding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research but it sounds like it might coincide with Congress passing a law.

"I guarantee you that we will sign an executive order for stem cells," Mr. Obama said, according to the sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the closed-door portion of the meeting.

Mr. Obama said the executive order would be coordinated with Congress on timing, and said it was important that Congress also pass a law codifying his order so that a future president couldn't simply reverse the policy back.

Meanwhile, in mice experiments, German scientists have turned neural stem cells into iPS cells by using a single gene.

The German team took neural stem cells from the brains of mice and used a virus to introduce a gene called Oct4. The gene is one of the four used by groups at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kyoto University in Japan when they reprogrammed human skin cells. The German experiment found that in mice, a single gene was all it took to transform the neural stem cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells.