December 12, 2008
OBAMA TRANSITION A Fresh Start for Embryonic Stem Cells
By: Constance Holden

U.S. researchers are eagerly anticipating themoment that President-elect Barack Obama takes off ice and sweeps away the Bush Administration’s restrictions on federal funding for research with human embryonic stem (ES) cells. Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) are making no secret of their glee. "I think everybody here is incredibly excited about the new Administration," says Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and chair of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force.

Landis predicts that despite the static NIH budget, more federal money will be going into basic research on human ES cells—funded at $42 million this year. Grants will be highly competitive, she says, because "there are incredibly promising things to do." Since President George W. Bush’s directive of 9 August 2001, federally funded researchers have been limited to 21 human ES cell lines that were derived before that date. But as soon as Obama says the word, as he has repeatedly promised to do, they will be able to use hundreds of lines derived since.

Picking up where the Clinton Administration left off in 2000, NIH will be drafting new guidelines on matters such as informed consent by donors of embryos from which cell lines were derived. Just how many of the more recently derived lines will qualify under the guidelines—and how the guidelines will be implemented—is yet to be determined. Nonetheless, Harvard University researcher Kevin Eggan predicts that "there will be a massive switch in the lines that people use."

Gone will be onerous requirements to keep federally funded ES cell research separate from privately funded research using nonapproved lines, which for some investigators has entailed the construction and outfitting of separate labs. It’s been "a pain in the behind even for someone [like me] with plenty of private cash," says Eggan. "This was a crazy artifact of the Bush policy that is antithetical to everything that good science is supposed to be about," says Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor...Read Entire Article