Word: stemness
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...Obama's Executive Order means that federally funded scientists who are interested in studying embryonic stem cells but could not afford duplicate facilities to store and experiment on them (that is, facilities that involved zero contributions from the government) can now do so. "I already have e-mails from scientists in this country asking to get in line to have us send them cells," says Melton, who used private funds to create 70 new lines after the 2001 ban and made them available at no cost to any lab that could study them. (See TIME's stem-cell covers...
...There is also a more practical release. For many scientists who continued to receive public funds while pursuing embryonic-stem-cell work with private money, the federal restrictions meant they had to segregate their two universes completely: not a single penny of government money could be used for embryonic-stem-cell work. Lab personnel had to log each minute they spent studying embryonic cells and keep all equipment, from computers to pens and pipettes, separate. Often, different lab facilities had to be built to avoid any potential crossover of funds. Melton's embryonic-stem-cell research was relegated...
...fanatic bookkeeping sounds excessive or paranoid, Fisher can assure you it isn't. In 2003 she published a study involving embryonic stem cells in the journal Science. The paper appeared online at noon one day, and within a few hours, she received an e-mail from a congressional staffer containing an exhaustive list of all her NIH grants and asking which had been used to support that study. "It was my first realization about how closely the government was watching," she says...
...especially gratifying since the restrictive Bush policy quashed her experiments in 2002. After a storm hammered San Francisco that winter, the university campus lost power; if not for the backup generators that pumped emergency electricity to its labs, countless cell cultures might have been lost. Fisher's embryonic-stem-cell lab, however, was off the campus grid, housed in a temporary facility built with private funds, which did not have a backup system. It took several days for power to be restored to that site, during which time Fisher had no other place to take her cells - she couldn...
...Still, Obama's Executive Order leaves intact a 1996 law, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which forbids the use of taxpayer dollars to create embryos solely for scientific study - for stem-cell or any other type of medical research in which the embryos would have to be destroyed. Without being able to create embryos and their stem cells specially for individual patients, researchers say there is a risk of incompatibility between patients and any stem cells created from unrelated embryos. Even though embryonic stem cells can be guided to become any type of cell in the body, if they are transplanted...