What are the costs of Bush's stance? To stem cell scientists, the principal burdens these days seem to be measured in annoyance and inconvenience, and deeply held frustration over the speed with which therapies can be brought to patients. Resources are hard to come by. "The role of the principal investigator these days is begging for money, any way you can get it," says Jose Cibelli, a stem cell scientist at Michigan State University. In 2002, the National Institutes of Health provided just $10 million to researchers working on embryonic stem cells, and $17 million in 2003. For complex biomedical research, these sums are paltry. "We need at least 10 times as much as what they're giving us now," Cibelli says. "Of course, everyone says that; everyone will want more money for their own work. But I truly believe this is the future of medicine, and we're not doing enough to fund it."

Some research teams have been successful at raising large sums of private money. At Harvard recently, a team led by Douglas Melton, a biologist working on stem cell therapies for Type-1 diabetes (he has two children who suffer from the disease), managed to obtain funding from several private groups in order to create 17 new cell lines for researchers to work with. The task, which a researcher in the New England Journal of Medicine called a "tour de force," was not completed without a little bit of inconvenience; to comply with federal funding rules, Melton needed to keep his work on new cell lines physically separate from his other government-funded work. "Before Melton could begin," the Boston Globe reported, "he had a new lab built in the renovated basement of another building, far from the Petri dishes and microscopes that had been a part of his federally funded work in the past." Harvard has announced plans to raise as much as $100 million in private money to fund a stem cell center to foster work like Melton's, but such luxuries aren't available to every stem cell scientist. "Doug Melton might be able to run a Harvard institute with a lot of money," says Arthur Caplan, who directs the University of Pennsylvania's bioethics center. "Junior faculty might not be able to do that."

Another cost of the federal policy is that not only does it limit what current researchers can do, but it may also keep new researchers away from the field. "There's a more subtle effect, which is that young ambitious scientists are leery about getting into work that isn't funded by the government," says Harold Varmus, the CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the director of the NIH under President Bill Clinton. "There's a general sense that if this is frowned upon by the government of the United States, scientists will say, 'Why would I want to go into that?'"

For scientists who choose to accept federal money by agreeing to work on pre-Aug. 9 stem cell lines (what researchers call the "presidential lines"), there are real limits on the kind of science that can be performed, researchers say. In his speech setting out his policy, Bush said he believed that his plan would allow researchers to "explore the promise and potential of stem cell research," but it doesn't seem as if they can do much more than that. "We can use them for basic research, but we're already starting to outgrow them," Evan Snyder, a stem cell scientist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif., says of the pre-Aug. 9 stem cells. Because they were developed in the early days of the science, the presidential lines, says Snyder, are difficult to work with. "They are not really well characterized, somewhat unstable. It's very difficult for everyone to maintain the lines in the same way from lab to lab."

The bigger problem is that scientists are not sure that any actual therapies can be derived from the presidential lines. When scientists first began extracting embryonic stem cells in the late 1990s, they often kept them alive using "feeder cells" from mice. This was handy in a research setting, but it raises safety issues for clinical settings -- scientists fear that injecting stem cells prepared with mouse feeder cells could introduce mouse viruses into humans. "The presidential lines reflect 1990s biology, and we've learned so much more biology since back then," Snyder says. "We've developed ways that we can grow the cells without touching animal materials. We've developed lines that are not killed by antibiotics. We can even grow cells that don't touch any biologics at all." Snyder also points out that the presidential lines might only be useful in leading to therapies for a small number of people, "because the lines do not represent the diversity of America. The presidential stem cell lines come from embryos that were taken from IVF clinics -- they reflect families that have infertility problems that went to an IVF clinic. Many of them were in Wisconsin, so maybe they reflect what goes on in white America of Scandinavian descent. There's no guarantee that you can generalize these cells for black Americans or Asian Americans or anyone else."

Bush's position, then, would seem to offer the scientific community a bleak future: the promise of research pointing to cures for disease, but a built-in ceiling preventing researchers from ever using federal money to reach those cures.

Supporters of the president often point out that private funds can still be used to conduct research on embryonic stem cells, and valuable research is in fact going on at biotech firms. But the work is much impeded without the help of the federal government. "Frankly, from a selfish, capitalistic perspective, we're thrilled as can be that we get to hold all the patents and we don' have to pay royalties to Harvard or MIT," says Michael West, of Advanced Cell Technology. "As a human being, though, my life goal is to cure some disease before I grow old and die. I would prefer that we have to pay royalties to Harvard and MIT and we have a cure for diabetes and heart disease in our lifetime. We may have made a lot of money if we do it ourselves -- but it's far more important that we race as quickly as possible to the cures.

"Embryonic stem cells," West adds, "are magical. We've never had anything like this before, they are a whole quantum leap beyond adult stem cells. They're absolutely magical -- and that magic that the scientist sees in the microscope will filter out to the average U.S. citizen. Someday people will see this as a positive thing for mankind."

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