Palscience

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 22, 2007; Page A03

Tuesday’s announcement that scientists had found a noncontroversial way to make cells equivalent to human embryonic stem cells did not just change the scientific and ethical landscape. It generated economic and geopolitical tremors through California, New York and about half a dozen other states that have invested — in some cases heavily — in embryonic stem cell programs and research centers.

States have together committed billions of dollars to fill the research vacuum left by the Bush administration, which in 2001 declared embryonic stem cell research largely off-limits for federal funding. Their hope has been to attract the best scientists and build research infrastructures, giving them a leg up on efforts to develop promising new stem cell therapies and assuring them futures as biomedical and economic powerhouses.

The possibility that embryonic stem cells will be eclipsed by “ips” cells — or “induced pluripotent stem cells,” “pluripotent” meaning “able to become virtually every kind of” — which can be created with relative ease and with abundant funding from the National Institutes of Health, could undermine those state-level ambitions and bring an early end to a novel experiment in scientific federalism, experts said.

It could also streamline progress and make it easier for scientists to collaborate across state lines: something that had become increasingly difficult as individual states created their own legal and ethical ground rules for embryo cell research.

“If the field turns more attention to ips cells under the umbrella of federal oversight, we may once again become the United States of Science as opposed to the Confederate States of Science,” said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Continue Reading