Life Links 6/29/12

Deng Jiyuan, the husband of the Chinese woman who was forced into a 7-month abortion has resurfaced in Beijing after leaving his hometown and is seeking help to get his wife released from the local hospital.

Despite her requests to leave, Ms. Feng has been held in Shanxi Zhenping County Hospital watched over by local government officials, since being forced to abort her seven-month-old fetus on June 2.

In a sign that local officials may be bending to public pressure, Ms. Feng's sister-in-law, Deng Jicai, said by phone Friday evening that doctors had told her Ms. Feng would be released from the hospital following a final check up on Saturday. "Right now there is no one blocking us from leaving," Ms. Deng said. "Those government people have been gone since yesterday."

The New York Attorney General's office wants former New York NARAL leader Kelli Conlon to repay all of the NARAL money she spent on herself (apparently hundreds of thousands).

The complaint cites more than $250,000 of improper expenses, some falsely documented, while noting Conlin's salary was $380,000 in 2010 and she exercised increasing control over its outside bookkeepers and intimidated staff.

They included $75,000 for retail purchases, with nearly $50,000 for designer clothing and shoes at stores such as Barneys and Giorgio Armani, some described in expense claims as "event decor" for the nonprofits' fundraisers.

Others were $17,000 for a July rental of a Southhampton house; $12,200 to pay her children's nanny; $26,000 for personal travel; $18,500 in hotel expenses in Manhattan, where NARAL-NY has its office, though she lived in Brooklyn; $50,000 for non-business meals, including 120 from a sushi restaurant near her home; and $70,000 for car services, most for shuttling her children.

In another brick in the mounting tower of evidence that human embryonic stem cell research is so 2002, the University of Massachusetts embryonic stem cell bank will close at the end of the year as funding dries up. The state of Massachusetts wasted $8.6 million on it since the legislation passed in 2008.

The state invested $8.6 million in public funds to establish the bank at the medical school's Shrewsbury campus.

That decision in 2008 was seen then as a bold statement of support for research on human embryonic stem cells during a time when federal funding for work on the controversial cells was restricted. But advances in technology and changes to federal policies rapidly made the bank obsolete, state officials said......

Originally, the bank was seen as a repository for embryonic stem cell lines that were being created but were not eligible for federal funding under Bush-era restrictions. The field has evolved significantly since then, with President Obama's loosening of restrictions on federal funding and the development of new technologies for making stem cells......

"It's certainly unfortunate that this investment hasn't panned out as planned, but I think it's a very different case from investing large amounts of money in a single company," Widmer said.

Some scientists said they were not surprised to learn of the endeavor's failure. Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his impression was that the banking effort never fully got off the ground. It did not announce the availability of its first stem cell lines until 2011.

So they blew through nearly $9 million in tax funds and will only have been a functioning embryonic stem cell bank for 2 years?