President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to reverse President Bush’s 2001 restrictions on federal funding for research on new embryonic stem cell lines “is certain to provide a psychological boost” to scientists, and it “may also inspire a round of collaborations between government scientists and those in the private sector,” the Wall Street Journal reports. However, according to the Journal, “these ambitions depend on the answers to two big questions: How much federal money will be available for the research? And how quickly can … [NIH] take on a leadership role in a field where it has only modest experience and whose funding efforts have lagged behind several state initiatives?”

A 1996 congressional edict prohibits the use of federal funds to create or destroy human embryos solely for research purposes. According to the Journal, the Obama administration could “sidestep” the edict by authorizing the use of federal funds for stem cell research using embryos that were created during privately funded in vitro fertilization procedures and that would otherwise be discarded. Under this scenario, the incoming Congress would have to act independently to lift public funding restrictions, the Journal reports. Any legislative proposal “would be virtually certain to renew the fierce political debate over the ethics of human-embryo research,” according to the Journal.

According to the Journal, “Stem cell advocates say that while federal restrictions have hurt U.S. pre-eminence in biomedical research, they haven’t stopped basic innovation in this field.” Earlier this year, for instance, federally funded Harvard University researchers produced human stem cell lines for 10 diseases, and privately financed scientists from Harvard and Columbia universities produced stem cells from the skin of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Meanwhile, at the state level, California and nine other states have circumvented federal restrictions through local funding initiatives (Naik/Hotz, Wall Street Journal, 11/25).