Obama to Restore Stem Cell Funding

Obama to Restore Stem Cell Funding
Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 7, 2009
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/c/a/2009/03/07/MNNB16AQFH.DTL>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/bzmyht>

President Obama plans to rescind limits on federal funding for research on
human embryonic stem cells by signing an executive order Monday,
fulfilling a campaign promise to frustrated supporters of the scientific
work.

The action has been eagerly anticipated by the thriving community of
California stem cell research, centered in the Bay Area, which hopes to
generate both a prosperous new industry and an arsenal of weapons against
debilitating diseases.

White House aides confirmed Friday that Obama will announce a stem cell
policy shift in an East Room ceremony. He is expected to lift restrictions
imposed by President George W. Bush in August 2001.

Scientists in the Bay Area, one of the world's top centers of stem cell
research and arguably the strongest in the nation, said they expect that
Obama will allow the National Institutes of Health to support research on
hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines that did not qualify for federal
funding under the Bush policy.

Bush had agreed with religious and conservative groups opposed on moral
grounds to the extraction of stem cells from human embryos. He limited NIH
support to work on 21 embryonic stem cell lines that already had been
created by 2001.

But researchers protested that those cells were unsuitable for use as
therapies and were inadequate for the exploration of the full scientific
potential of stem cell studies.

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