Now, a year later, it’s still tough to get a solid line count. Of the 78 eligible ones now listed on the official National Institutes of Health stem-cell registry, only 17 are “accessible.” (Many of the other 61 lines are tangled in intellectual-property disputes.) U.S. researchers estimate that, at most, only three of the accessible lines are ready for use. “Little is known about the other lines, so it is still impossible to say how many of them are stable enough for distribution,” says Roger Pedersen, a pioneering U.S. stem-cell researcher now at Cambridge University in England.
This week frustrated researchers from the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research will call for a White House summit to discuss ways of improving the system. A senior administration official says Bush has no immediate plans to address the issue, but that he expects research to accelerate now that the NIH finally has a new director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni. Still, scientists worry the funding restrictions will derail research. “Bush has put a barrier in front of the very kinds of experiments he had in mind,” says Nobel laureate Paul Berg, chair of public policy for the American Society of Cell Biologists. It’s a decision Bush is unlikely to revisit any time soon.
