November 19, 2008
Stem-cell futures: In the changed political climate, US agencies can provide a new kind of leadership

      Given his campaign promises, it seems likely that US Presidentelect Barack Obama will move quickly after his inauguration on 20 January to lift the Bush administration’s restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem (ES) cell research. That will be good news for American scientists, if only because they will no longer have to decide between the human ES cell lines best able to answer their questions and the lines for which they can receive federal funds. But perhaps the biggest advantage is that their most important funding agency, the US$29-billion National Institutes of Health (NIH), can now start to lead from the front.
     The agency has a lot of catching up to do. Since 9 August 2001, when President George W. Bush declared that federal funding could only support work with human ES cell lines already in existence, the NIH has largely had to sit on the sidelines while others stepped in to fill the gap. Several US states launched their own initiatives for funding stem-cell research, complete with peer-review panels and regulatory policies. Meanwhile, in a miracle of organization and diplomacy, the International Stem Cell Forum, a working group chaired by the UK Medical Research Council, coordinated scientists across 11 countries to thoroughly compare and characterize some five dozen ES cell lines, only a few of which could be studied using NIH funds. Read More...Nature 456, 282 (20 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456282a