Jonathan Moreno

So this is an important day for the American people and for the future of American science. Today President Obama will rescind the limits on embryonic stem cell research that were created by President Bush in 2001. These limits have meant that federal funds on embryonic stem cell research could only be used on what is now 21 embryonic stem cell lines even though scientists say that they need hundreds if not thousands of more lines to make the kinds of advances we need to address basic diseases from which millions of Americans suffer.

The crucial change in the rules will allow NIH funding to be applied to many more lines of human embryonic stem cells so that the NIH, the National Institute of Health, can do the job that its really the best at doing in the country which is coordinating work among many different laboratories, among many different universities, so that work is not being redundant and also helping the states coordinate their work so that the states can benefit from the economic opportunities as well as benefiting medical science which is part of the mission of the state university system.

In addition President Obama will release a memo today that instructs the federal government to ensure that only the best evidence based science is used as the foundation of government policy. So that in itself will be a big change from the past eight years when people have been coming out of the federal government, like a former surgeon general and saying that under President Bush he wasn't able to say things that he felt he really needed to benefit the public health. In 2001 President Bush imposed pretty strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research in terms of the funding that the federal government could give for this very promising line of work.

Human embryonic stem cells have the ability to form any cell in the human body, in principle that means that if you got the cells to work in a certain way they could replace diseased tissue or a diseased tissue in any system in the human body that was malfunctioning, like a pancreas, or a heart or a liver or a spinal cord. That’s one possibility for embryonic stems cells; another is that we could find more efficient ways and safer ways to develop new drugs using cells in the laboratory rather then putting experimental drugs in people. A third, and maybe the most important, is to understand the basic genetics of disease at the very beginning of human life so that we can get some clues as to how to address serious diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's which might only effect us in our sixth, seventh or eight decade of life but which already are beginning to form very early on in our cells.

So what we will begin to see in the future, I think, is many more human embryonic stem cell lines that will be available for this kind of research, for drug development, for basic science, and in some cases even putting these cells into human participants in research. This is part of what scientists call regenerative medicine, the idea of using our cells to heal our selves instead of drugs or surgery or, in many cases, just waiting for the disease process to continue. This is a new way of doing medicine, this would be 21st century medicine, and it means we are now in a position to build not only the medicine of the future but the biotechnology of the future. Half of America's economic growth since World War II has been based on science and technology, the rest of the world has been moving forward, Southeast Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe, in many cases. We need to be part of this, we need to ensure that we continue to be the world leader in bio technology and the future of embryonic stem cell research is a crucial part of that.