Now that President Obama's in the White House, he's rolling out changes - closing Guantanamo Bay, permitting Federal funding for agencies that publicise abortion, and now enabling Federal funding for stem cell research.
Perhaps related to the thaw in stem cell research, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a proposal aimed at investigating the use of embryonic stem cell therapy in spinal injury (BBC News). The proposal, from Geron Corp., has been approved.
Geron Corp, the company behind the research, plans to initiate a clinical trial in a handful of patients paralysed due to spinal cord injury.
Embryonic stem cell research wasn't completely banned by George W. Bush's administration, as commercially funded research cold carry on unhindered by bigoted right wing religious policies. Geron spent considerable funds on this research:
Geron, a biotech company based in "silicon valley" south of San Francisco, has spent $170m on developing a stem cell treatment for spinal cord injury.
Still, the luddites will continue to object:
Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (Core), which opposes embryonic stem cell therapies, dismissed the research as "highly speculative".
"We've never changed our point of view, which is that embryonic stem cell treatments cannot ever be justified," she said.
It's possible that the new US administration's more liberal attitude will spark progressive attitudes elsewhere.
I'm writing a joint NiA-BBSRCgrant proposal with colleages which has to be in the US National Institutes of Health format. These are much bigger and complex documents than are usual with UK Research Councils, but that pales into insignificance next toGeron's application, which the BBC report as being 21,000 pages long!