We welcome President Obama’s decision to lift the Bush administration’s restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. His move ends a long, bleak period in which the moral objections of religious conservatives were allowed to constrain the progress of a medically important science.
Even with this enlightened stance, some promising stem cell research will still be denied federal dollars. For that to change, Congress must lift a separate ban that it has imposed every year since the mid-1990s.
Mr. Obama also pledged on Monday to base his administration’s policy decisions on sound science, undistorted by politics or ideology. He ordered his science office to develop a plan for all government agencies to achieve that goal.
Such a pledge should be unnecessary. Unfortunately, for eight years, former President George W. Bush did just the opposite. He chose scientific advisory committees based on ideology rather than expertise. His political appointees aggressively ignored, distorted or suppressed scientific findings to promote a political agenda or curry favor with big business.
This cynical approach seriously hampered government efforts to address global warming and encourage sound family planning practices, among other issues.
President Obama was appropriately cautious, warning that the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown and should not be overstated. Some of the benefits, he said, might not appear in our lifetime or even our children’s lifetime. But scientists hope that stem cell therapies may eventually lead to treatments or cures for a wide range of degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and diabetes, and Mr. Obama rightly promised to pursue the research with urgency.
In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Bush restricted federal financing for embryonic stem cell research to what turned out to be 20 or so stem cell lines that had been created prior to his announcement. Those lines are too limited in number, variety and quality to allow the full range of needed research.
With the end of the Bush restrictions, scientists receiving federal money will be able to work with hundreds of stem cell lines that have since been created — and many more that will be created in the future. The full range of additional research allowed won’t become apparent until new guidelines governing what research can qualify for federal support are issued by the National Institutes of Health.
Other important embryonic research is still being hobbled by the so-called Dickey-Wicker amendment. The amendment, which is regularly attached to appropriations bills for the Department of Health and Human Services, prohibits the use of federal funds to support scientific work that involves the destruction of human embryos (as happens when stem cells are extracted) or the creation of embryos for research purposes.
Until that changes, scientists who want to create embryos — and extract stem cells — matched to patients with specific diseases will have to rely on private or state support. Such research is one promising way to learn how the diseases develop and devise the best treatments. Congress should follow Mr. Obama’s lead and lift this prohibition so such important work can benefit from an infusion of federal dollars.
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