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Many people are aware that soon after President Obama took office, he authorized federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which President Bush had resis

by jawns 10y ago

Many people are aware that soon after President Obama took office, he authorized federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which President Bush had resisted. The Obama administration made a big deal out of it at the time: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/removing-barriers-responsible-scientific-research-involving-human-stem-cells https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/removing-barrier... What got swept under the rug was that at the same time, President Obama specifically rescinded a previous executive order that directed the HHS to "conduct and support" research using adult stem cells: https://www.cellmedicine.com/obama-executive-order/ https://www.cellmedicine.com/obama-executive-order/ I don't think the Obama administration ever spelled out why, at the same time it was promoting ESCR, it decided to also deprioritize adult stem cell research, but I think this latest news -- along with all of the other advances of the past eight years -- has shown that moral issues aside, adult stem cell research is paying high dividends.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I don't think the Obama administration ever spelled out why, at the same time it was promoting ESCR, it decided to also deprioritize adult stem cell research It was all part of the same EO, which was accompanied on the same day by a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity in government decisionmaking on science and technology, and the rationale for the set of policy changes was explicitly to move toward allowing decisions on what avenues of science to pursue (not the goals, but the routes to the goals) to be guided by science rather than politics. It wasn't deprioritizing adult stem cell research, it was letting the relative priority of adult stem research be set, and adjusted, over time based on science, rather than being set by political directive.

by jawns 10y ago

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I don't think the Obama administration ever spelled out why, at the same time it was promoting ESCR, it decided to also deprioritize adult stem cell research It was all part of the same EO, which was accompanied on the same day by a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity in government decisionmaking on science and technology, and the rationale for the set of policy changes was explicitly to move toward allowing decisions on what avenues of science to pursue (not the goals, but the routes to the goals) to be guided by science rather than politics. It wasn't deprioritizing adult stem cell research, it was letting the relative priority of adult stem research be set, and adjusted, over time based on science, rather than being set by political directive.