San Francisco to benefit from end of stem cell ban
By: Brent Begin
Examiner Staff Writer
March 10, 2009
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| Paving the way: Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, reacted favorably to the news that President Obama on Monday cleared the way for a significant increase in federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research. (AP) |
SAN FRANCISCO — The overturning of the eight-year federal ban on embryonic stem cell research will have an immediate effect in San Francisco, allowing labs more freedom to conduct research under the same roof.
Opponents of stem cell research argue that stem cell research is immoral, because human embryos — or cells cloned from donated eggs and sperm — must be destroyed in order to harvest the cells. Those ethical concerns prompted President George W. Bush to ban federal support for new embryonic stem cell research.
President Barack Obama on Monday, however, repealed that ban and called for vigorous support of scientists who pursue the research.
While the federal ban was in place, there was a “costly and complex bureaucracy needed to maintain the duplication and separation of equipment and facilities,” according to the San Francisco-based California Institute of Regenerative Medicine.
The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UC San Francisco in Mission Bay had dealt directly with that bureaucracy, according to Director Arnold Kriegstein.
All state and privately funded research had been conducted off campus, while research funded by federal dollars was conducted in a separate laboratory on campus, Kriegstein said.
Now, the campus hopes to have most of its research under one roof in a larger building set to be completed by the end of 2010.
“It really uncouples science and politics,” Kriegstein said. “It puts the government’s policies in line with the science rather than the ideology.”
The federal support will produce “modest increases in stem cell funding in the current economic climate,” according to the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the state agency in San Francisco formed to dole out billions of California voter-approved dollars to universities for stem cell research.
“The president’s decision to reverse an eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research will be of tremendous benefit not only to San Francisco, and California, but to the world as a whole,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
