Published 11 March 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1011
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1011

News

Obama reverses US federal funding restrictions on stem cell research

Janice Hopkins Tanne

1 New York

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

President Barack Obama has removed the ban introduced by the previous US president, George Bush, on using federal funds to support embryonic stem cell research, in an executive order issued this week.

Government support will now be available for research with many more stem cell lines than previously. These lines are developed from surplus embryos that remain after fertility treatment; the embryos would otherwise have been stored indefinitely or destroyed.

President Obama said that human cloning would never be permitted and that research would proceed under strict guidelines to be developed by the National Institutes of Health over the next four months.

The order does not provide funding to create new embryonic stem cell lines because of a ban called the Dickey-Wicker amendment. This prevents using federal funds to create human embryos for research in which they are later destroyed, which occurs when stem cells are extracted. The amendment has . . . [Full text of this article]


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US National Institutes of Health issue guidelines on stem cell
Janice Hopkins Tanne
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