Federal funding for stem cell research has always been a cause of concern for stem cell researchers and supporters. With Obama’s victory, hopes are alive to solve the problem.

Effective federal funding for stem cell research is crucial. In late 1994, the National Institutes of Health accepted all of the recommendations of its Human Embryo Research Panel. But the election of a conservative Republican Congress that year doomed our suggestions. In 1996, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibited federal funding for any research involving the destruction of human embryos. While President Bush in 2001 authorized research using a small number of previously established stem cell lines, this initiative has had limited effect — only 22 lines of cells and modest funding have been made available.

What should the new president do? Obama should minimize opposition by following the lead President Bush established in 2001. In justifying his policy of funding research on a limited number of human embryonic stem cell lines, Bush stated that “the life and death decision” had already been made on the embryos used to create those lines. By executive order, Obama could authorize the NIH to invite couples who planned to discard their frozen embryos to donate them for research. The couples would have to affirm that they no longer intended to use the embryos and had already decided to destroy them.

Instead of the embryos merely being thawed and incinerated, as happens today, their cells could be used to produce lines for stem cell research. The moral parallel here is organ donation after death. In this case, the embryo’s death is an unavoidable result of its creation and subsequent non-use for reproductive purposes. The production of stem cells from these embryos could easily be accomplished without federal support, and the resulting stem cells could be donated for federal research.

Would this approach eliminate all opposition to human embryonic stem cell research? Probably not. Many Americans still oppose any destruction of human embryos. Yet by observing that this policy represented only an extension of the one established by his predecessor, and by stressing the beneficial use of embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, President Obama could succeed in reducing the most vehement opposition to a manageable level.

Source: washingtonpost

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