PRESIDENT Bush鈥檚 policy on embryonic stem cell research is in the firing line again, after the release on 4 March of 17 new embryonic stem cell lines. Douglas Melton of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University has made the new lines freely available, but under Bush鈥檚 rules federally funded researchers remain banned from working with them. They can only use ESC lines derived before 9 August 2001, and of the 78 ESC lines that qualified only 15 are available.
Moreover, the president鈥檚 panel of bioethics advisers, the Council on Bioethics, now has a majority against ESC research. Pro-research members Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and William May of the University of Virginia were replaced by three members said to share the conservative views of the chairman, Leon Cass.
Researchers are alarmed by the news. 鈥淚t鈥檚 unconscionable,鈥� says Roger Pedersen, an American stem cell researcher now at the University of Cambridge, UK, who moved to sidestep the federal ban. 鈥淲e are really loading the dice against ourselves,鈥� says John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, who says Bush alone now dictates the rules on stem cell research: 鈥淭he policy in the US at this time is not the result of any open debate.鈥�
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