LOS ANGELES AND WASHINGTON — Making good on a popular campaign pledge, President Obama will sign an executive order Monday rescinding restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, administration officials said Friday -- instantly making hundreds of millions of new dollars available for the controversial science.
President Bush had limited the use of funding from the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies to a handful of cell lines created with private money before August 2001 so that taxpayers would not have to pay for the sacrifice of embryos, viewed by some social conservatives as tantamount to murder.
The signing is expected to take place during an event intended to highlight the importance of "sound science" in government policymaking, according to one official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Details of the executive order were not available, but people who had been briefed said Obama would ask the Department of Health and Human Services, which operates the NIH, to work out the specifics.
Across the country, stem cell scientists are counting down the final hours of the Bush policy with glee. They charge that it has slowed the pace of research into cures for intractable diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, to the detriment of millions of patients.
A policy change will give those efforts a significant boost, as well as advance scientists' efforts to use the cells to make replacement tissues like new cardiac muscle for treating heart attack patients and nerve cells for repairing spinal cord injuries.
Reversing the policy will give scientists unfettered access to hundreds of newer stem cells that are free of the chromosomal abnormalities and animal molecules that render the so-called presidential cell lines problematic for use in potential medical therapies.
Many scientists are also eager to get their hands on the dozens of new lines that carry the genetic signatures of diseases they study. None of the presidential lines has that feature.
Stem cell scientist Julie Baker plans to celebrate by peeling dozens of color-coded stickers off of the equipment in her carefully segregated lab at the Stanford School of Medicine. Green labels are affixed to microscopes, incubators and other supplies that were permitted to be used on federally funded research. Red labels are stuck to equipment that had to be used when working with cell lines that were on the wrong side of the Bush policy.
