"Obama To Loosen Stem Cell Funding"

Rob Stein has an article in today's Washington Post stating that the Obama administration is going to remove some of the limits imposed by the Bush administration on embryonic stem cell research.

I am no expert on stem cells, but this seems to me to be a significant step forward. The current regulation refuses to allow federal funding for stem cell research, except for a very few lines of cells that existed before the ban. Obviously there could be differences among stem cell lines as profound as the differences among people, and limiting research to only a few lines seems foolish, given the hopes that we have for medical breakthroughs via stem cell research.

Every once and a while there is a newspaper article stating that some new approach has been found to produce pluripotent stem cells from other than embryos, which is all to the good, but as far as I can tell that work does not eliminate the importance of embryonic stem cell research. So too, a number of states and private funding agencies have stepped in to fund U.S. embryonic stem cell research in the absence of federal funding, and there are of course programs in other nations, but the Bush administration effectively chained the "800 pound gorilla" of biomedical research funding -- the federal government. Moreover, it is both morally and economically wrong to depend on other countries to develop stem cell technology.

The Bush administration was concerned that creating embryonic stem cell lines required the sacrifice of embryos. They were unmoved by the fact that large numbers of embryos are discarded every year when no longer needed for implantation, and that it is clearly better to use these for something that could benefit mankind than to flush them.

Of course we should regulate stem cell research, but we should not let religious superstitions get in the way of reasoning as to the most moral approach to that regulation, much less should we let pandering to a narrow political constituency dominate this or any area of public policy.