Stem-cell futures

摘要

Given his campaign promises, it seems likely that US Presidentelect Barack Obama will move quickly after his inauguration on 20 January to lift the Bush administration's restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem (ES) cell research. That will be good news for American scientists, if only because they will no longer have to decide between the human ES cell lines best able to answer their questions and the lines for which they can receive federal funds. But perhaps the biggest advantage is that their most important funding agency, the US$29-billion National Institutes of Health (NIH), can now start to lead from the front.