Obama lifts ban on embryonic stem cell research

Yesterday, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to lift restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, overturning a Bush administration policy that patients and medical researchers said hindered the development of new medical treatments. Obama signed the order before a White House audience packed with scientists – the Chicago Sun-Times gives a list of participants and attendees.

“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama said. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute (GPI), said in a statement: “In order to provide certainty, the next step is to protect embryonic stem cell research by legislation. Building on the momentum, it’s time to repeal the Dickey-Wicker Amendment that serves as a blockade for funding research on work on embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization procedures to derive new cell lines or somatic cell nuclear transfer. All stem cell advocates applaud Congresswoman Diana DeGette who has expressed her intention to seek reversal of this fundamental funding restriction.”

The Associated Press reports that scientists are cheering Obama’s lifting of federal funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, hopeful the move will open the financial floodgates to speed new treatments. “It’s wonderful. We are elated,” said Jan Nolta, who directs the stem cell research program at the University of California at Davis. “Now that we can use the federal funds, it will just go so much more quickly.”

Michael West, chief executive of BioTime, said he expected to see increased demand for the hundreds of stem cell lines sold by his Emeryville-based company. More importantly to the industry, West said, private investors will be less afraid of putting their money into stem cell startups. Venture capitalists and big pharmaceutical companies in the past have been skittish about investing in stem cell companies out of fear that federal regulations could tighten even further, he said. “It’s a green light that will go a long way in my experience to people committing capital. Not knowing the future was really a major risk factor.”

Not everyone is excited though. The International Herald Tribune reports today that after Obama signed the order, the Vatican and US and Italian Church leaders condemned the move. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on pro-life activities, called Obama’s decision “a sad victory of politics over science and ethics”.

The Chicago Tribune and The Capital Times carry some quotes from well-known researchers, many of whom have signed Declan’s petition to the UN on somatic cell nuclear transfer, sometimes referred to as “therapeutic cloning” to distinguish it from reproductive cloning research. Below is a statement from James Thomson, professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is credited as the world’s first person ever to isolate an embryonic stem cell, first from a rhesus monkey in 1995 and then from a human in 1998. Prof Thomson is often acknowledged by his peers as “the founder of the field”. He said:

The executive action by President Obama lifting restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research is a welcome milestone for our field. The decision will help restore America as a leader in this field and is a clear path out of a policy thicket that has slowed the pace of discovery for eight years. It also removes a stigma that has discouraged many bright young people from embarking on careers in stem cell research. Research on embryonic stem cells remains critically important. We have many unanswered questions, and the only way to realize the full potential of embryonic stem cells and other types of stem cells is a level playing field and unfettered inquiry. Human-induced pluripotent stem cells - the transformed adult cells that seem to mimic the qualities of embryonic stem cells - would not have been possible without research on human embryonic stem cells. We are grateful to President Obama for the courage of his decision as well as for the broad bipartisan support our work has received in Washington.

Bernard Siegel: The new US President must heed calls for stem cell research

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). In fact, from all the emails I sent on Friday, Sunday and yesterday – 532 in total (115, 132 and 285 respectively) – no one has signed; if I include Thursday, it is one signatory from 692 emails. I always get an exceedingly low number of out-of-office autoreplies: yesterday, for example, I got seven autoreplies – 158 to the US Medical Schools Microbiology and Immunology Chairs yielded two, from 2nd and 74th emails; and 77 to Newcastle University's School of Biology and School of Chemistry yielded zero.

There are two other reasons why it is not credible that no scientist or academic would sign Declan’s petition: within two weeks Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is likely to be elected President of the United States (he will be lifting the funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research imposed by President George W Bush), and the United Nations is set to revisit the issue of therapeutic cloning next week (see blog of 19 October “United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue”); not to mention that the petition has been signed by 564 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.



An article in the Public Service Review by Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute, examines some of the obstacles regarding hESC research that will remain beyond 20 January 2009 – the day when Barack Obama or Republican presidential candidate John McCain will be inaugurated. Although scientists worry that McCain’s campaign statements have become progressively less supportive of hESC research, it is “widely expected that the new President will support the lifting of the arbitrary funding restrictions imposed by George W Bush on the National Institute of Health (NIH) funding embryonic stem cell research,” says Siegel.

President Bush restricted federal funding to only those embryonic stem cell lines, approximately 21 in number, in existence on 9th August 2001, the date he announced his policy, his rationale being, according to Siegel, that funding on embryonic stem cell lines created after that date “would somehow make the government complicit in the future destruction of human life”. Since 2001, NIH has funded approximately $3bn for adult stem cell research, says Siegel, while a relatively paltry $160m (estimated) has gone into researching the approved ‘presidential’ lines. Those lines, he adds, have been supplanted by hundreds of more recently derived lines better suited for research and most free of animal proteins. These new lines remain off limits to US researchers and their laboratories utilising NIH funding grants for their research.

“Historically, the America's policy debates, the so-called ‘stem cell wars’, parallels the rise of the social-conservative tide that placed George W Bush in power,” writes Siegel. “The opposition sought to elevate the legal standing of tiny, microscopic clumps of frozen cells, in effect, dragging embryonic stem cells and medical science into the forefront of the intractable abortion debate in America. The leadership of the ‘right to life’ movement, comprised of fundamentalist evangelical Christians and Catholics, strategised that they could undermine support for abortion rights if they could convince the public that blastocysts in a petri dish are equal to living, breathing persons.

“Many social-conservative think-tanks created specific bioethics agendas opposed to embryonic stem cell research. Organisations such as the American Enterprise Institute, Family Research Council and Discovery Institute, with combined budgets of millions of dollars, are the architects of endless legal gambits. They are authors of the media ‘talking points’ used by the social conservative politicos and allied cable news pundits. All are geared towards delay and obfuscation, not illumination.”

A new American president will not dissolve opposition. “Expect the foes of the research to continue to seek restrictions through lawsuits, delaying actions and state by state fights,” warns Siegel. “Each year, hundreds of bills are filed in almost every state seeking to elevate the status of in vitro blastocysts, defining ‘personhood’ as beginning at conception, thus raising the prospect of halting access to surplus embryos donated by their progenitors for medical research. The opposition seemingly prefer that embryos remain perpetually frozen or be discarded as medical waste, rather than used in potentially life-saving research.

“Beyond January 2009, many obstacles will remain. Without broad public support and impetus, there is concern that regulatory approval for the first embryonic stem cell clinical trials might be unreasonably delayed. Funding restrictions might be lifted through executive order or legislation, but will the money be there to advance the research? The NIH budget remains stagnant. With inflationary pressures on the economy, the [consumer] movement remains mobilised to make sure stem cells are a priority.”

Siegel concludes: “Globally, the advent of US federal funding for hESCR will galvanise the field in new ways. The political climate in the United States will certainly change for the better. But the consumer movement must be vigilant, lest the determined foes devise new strategies and tactics to delay the promise and hope for cures.”