Stem Cell Bait and Switcheroo

You know the drill, Bu$hCo perfected it.

It looks like the Oborg assimilated it with Change and Change again:

When President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in March, many scientists hailed the move as a long-awaited boost for one of the most promising fields of medical research.

Since then, however, many proponents have concluded that the plan could have the opposite effect, putting off-limits for federal support much of the research underway, including work that the Bush administration endorsed. "We're very concerned," said Amy Comstock Rick, chief executive of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which has been leading the effort to free up more federal funding for stem cell research. "If they don't change this, very little current research would be eligible. It's a huge issue."

The concern focuses on strict new ethics criteria that the National Institutes of Health has proposed. Advocates of stem cell research say that most of the work currently underway passed close ethical scrutiny but that the procedures varied and usually did not match the details specified in the proposed new guidelines.

"It's not that past practices were shoddy," said Lawrence S. Goldstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California at San Diego. "But they don't necessarily meet every letter of the new guidelines moving forward. We'd have to throw everything out and start all over again."

...Initially, however, proponents were pleased that the proposal would allow funding of studies on the hundreds of new lines already in existence.

After studying the guidelines further, however, they concluded that, in their current form, the guidelines would severely restrict funding for the existing lines.

"They take 2009 standards and attempt to apply them retroactively, which isn't really a standard that would allow most of the preexisting lines to be acceptable for NIH funding," said George Q. Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "This is essentially moving the goal post."

The guidelines, for example, require that the documents that couples sign when they agree to donate their embryos for research specify that they were fully informed of other options, such as donating their embryos to other couples instead. Although many clinics offered couples such options, that information was not usually laid out in detail in the written consent forms.

"That information might have been presented in another document. It might have been discussed with the couple but not written," said Sean J. Morrison, director of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology. "But it wasn't necessarily written in the consent document itself."

No one is certain exactly how many stem cell lines exist or how many would comply with the requirements in the guidelines. But a review of the 21 lines that Bush had approved indicates that perhaps just two would be eligible, and that most of the hundreds of others created since then would fall short, Daley and others said...

Yes, you read that right. Although technically unopposed to stem cell research, the One (doubtless in the spirit of Hope and Faith and Unity and outreach to the Religious Right) has made it harder to get stem cell research funded. Ethics, you know.