WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to sign an executive order Monday reversing an 8-year-old restriction on the federal funding of stem-cell research, a congressional source said today.
The move has been expected for weeks by researchers and disease sufferers after Obama said during the campaign that he opposed the restrictions, which limit funding for research for all but a small number of embryonic stem-cell lines.
Still, the move will mark the end of a long struggle by advocates of the research, who in years of emotional pleas before Congress and elsewhere have argued that the restrictions have prevented potential breakthroughs, prolonging the suffering of millions of people.
Obama’s plans also are being reported by The Washington Post and the Associated Press.
The Denver Post source, who asked not to be named because they were unauthorized to speak on the topic by the White House, said the announcement will be made in Washington on Monday.
The White House ceremony, which is expected to take place just after mid-day, will reverse a directive signed by President George W. Bush in 2001. That directive was followed by a dramatic fall off in stem-cell research in the United States.
Since then, scientists in other countries have made the biggest breakthroughs using stem cells to treat disease — including their use by Spanish doctors to recently rebuild a patient’s esophagus.
But the issue continues to be a political lightening rod in the United States, where critics oppose the use of powerful embryonic stem cells, which are seen as the most effective for potential treatment but destroy the embryo when they are extracted.
Kristofer Eisenla, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat and the leading congressional advocate for lifting the funding restrictions, would not confirm the White House move nor say whether DeGette would attend the signing.
Without commenting on reports of the signing, he released the following statement from DeGette: “An executive order by President Obama would be a tremendous leap forward in unlocking the potential cures to thousands of diseases.”
DeGette was the primary architect of two bipartisan efforts — in 2005 and 2007 — to reopen the flow of federal research dollars from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health. Both bills were knocked down by Bush in the first and third vetoes of his presidency.
Eisenla did say that if Obama overturns the restrictions, the congresswoman might still pursue a bill that would codify that into law. And she also was interested in an “uber stem-cell bill” that would address several outstanding concerns around stem-cell research, including establishing with the NIH broad-based ethical guidelines for research that uses embryonic stem-cell lines.
“A lot people ask why we need embryonic when we could use skin stem cells,” Eisenla said. “Many researchers have pointed out that the most promise has come from embryonic stem-cell research. Congresswoman DeGette believes part of the reason we should institute ethical oversight is to ensure that scientists are overseeing this issue as opposed to politicians.”
