President Obama is expected to soon reverse the Bush administration policy on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Presumably, this will be a major step toward what he described in his Inaugural Address as a pledge to “restore science to its rightful place.” The New York Times could not resist publishing the sappy story of scientists around the country teary-eyed with joy at the coming “restoration.”

Oy veh!

The truth of the matter is that President Bush’s August 9, 2001 decision to limit federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells (limiting it exclusively to research on the lines of cells already in existence prior to that date) was a watershed moment for the science of stem cell research: for the first time in history, federal money was being made available for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.

Consequently, hESC research has been carried on at labs throughout this country, with no legal barriers to prohibit such research or the private financing of it. The President, in announcing his policy on stem cell funding, reasoned that embryos destroyed prior to the policy were already dead and could not be brought back to life. The goal of his policy was to discourage further embryo-killing, not to discourage the advancement of scientific knowledge in the field. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Bush’s prudential judgment on the matter, the fact is that the U.S. has been and remains the international leader in original embryonic stem cell research.

It is in light of this more objective assessment of the facts that one has to ask what real impact Obama’s change of policy might have on the field of stem cell research. To find out, I recently spoke with Westchester Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Markus Grompe.

Markus Grompe is the Ray Hickey Chair and Director of the Papé Family Pediatric Research Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. He also is the Director of the Oregon Stem Cell Center and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. A leading stem cell researcher in his own right, Markus consistently opposes embryo-destructive research and has been a leader in the search for scientifically acceptable alternatives. Here is what he shared with me when I spoke with him over the weekend.

Berg: Assuming Obama will soon lift restrictions on the federal funding of
human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, how do you see a sudden influx of money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) impacting the status of this research?

Grompe: I do not believe the NIH is going to “open the floodgates” beyond what is already being funded. The only federal restriction President Bush placed on this funding was for the creation of new lines of stem cells, created after August 9, 2001 or the subsequent funding of research using lines created after that date. So, I do not expect NIH funding to increase that much.

In hESC research, only a tiny part of it has to do with deriving new lines of embryonic stem cells. The bulk of it has to do with laboratory attempts to get those cells to differentiation into new cell types. This part of the research, the bulk of it, has already been largely supported by NIH. I don’t see Obama’s new funding rule having a major impact. The truth is that this area of research is already well funded. At this point, the production of new lines of hESC’s promises little scientific gain. The only difference here is that research on the other non-Bush lines (those generated after Aug. 9, 2001) would now be eligible for funding. But these lines are already largely distributed. The supposed demand for “new lines” of human embryonic stem cells was largely political and I doubt most labs are going to want to spend time creating new lines. The Bush lines were by and large sufficient for robust research. The whole premise that the ‘Bush doctrine’ has been “holding back the field” has just never been true.

Berg: Given this reversal of policy, do not existing efforts in states like
California, New York, and Maryland to offer state funding for such research lose their purposefulness?

Grompe: If the purpose of these state-based initiatives was explicitly to compensate for the lack of federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, this is certainly true. Interestingly, however, the California initiative ushered in by Prop 71 and publicized as exclusively for embryonic stem cell research reinvented itself early on as an "all-stem cell research” initiative. People who voted for Prop 71 were told just the opposite, but the organizers of the California stem cell initiative (The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine) never planned it to be an exclusively embryonic stem cell fund.

I would also note that many scientists are of the opinion that hESC research has been largely over-rated. It is even driven to some extent by an infatuation with of the ‘forbidden fruit’ you might say. Many scientists believe that too much useful money has been unfortunately diverted to this research, in a disproportionate amount.

Berg: Can you give us your sense of the status on where iPS research (direct cell reprogramming) stands and where it is going in the short run (the next 4-5 years)?

Grompe: Right now, iPS research is rapidly becoming the dominant way to make pluripotent stem cells. It is highly likely that reprogramming will work without having to use viruses to introduce genetic alterations directly into the genome of the cells. That is the current way of proceeding, and although it works, it would still not be safe to do it this way with human cells. But soon scientists should be able to reprogram the cells by simply soaking the cells in a kind of chemical cocktail—no viruses needed. They already have this working in mouse cells, and I can’t emphasize enough the speed with which this is happening. One problem so far with iPS cells has been that, once reprogrammed (from skin cells to pluripotent cells), they remember that they were once skin cells. I’ve seen this happen a lot in my own lab. Reversion to their original state is a problem here, but scientists are working hard at it to solve the problem. The new approach—making them without permanent genetic alterations—should also help to more easily solve this problem.

Berg: Will this be the year when some team of researchers reports successfully deriving embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo?

Grompe: I don't think so. The main reason is the dearth of human eggs. As we know eggs in large quantities are needed for successful cloning, and so far it looks like most women are being sensible and not very open to selling their eggs for research, especially if that entails unknown health risks. And given the success and ease of the iPS approach, it’s hard to imagine what the scientific benefit of human cloning would be at this point. It’s much easier to do this with the iPS cells. I have no doubt, however, that some researcher somewhere will attempt human cloning just for the sake of doing it.

Berg: A bit over a decade since the advent of hESC research, is stem cell research in general panning out to be everything researchers (whether working with adult stem cells or embryonic) believed it would be?

Grompe: There is no real good answer to this question because every researcher has a different opinion on this. For the most part, the people who hyped the promise of hESC research didn't really believe what they were saying themselves. They were playing political games, knowing full well that there were no therapies forthcoming anytime soon.

For a succinct and insightful history of the stem cell debate in the U.S., see Joseph Bottum and Ryan Anderson, “Stem Cells: a Political History” in the November 2008 issue of First Things.