Private Stem Cell Funding Good for Now, Not Forever

Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley reports on a Forbes article detailing the impressive degree to which various billionaires are picking up the slack left in the wake of restrictive Bush Administration regulations on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. From the original article:

Since the ban, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell work has risen to all of $40 million a year, just one-fifth of the money for other kinds of stem cells and a pittance in the $20 billion research budget of the government's National Institutes of Health. But Eli Broad and a few other billionaires--some of them from President Bush's own Republican Party--and a number of states and private foundations have stepped into the gap. They have funneled three times as much as the federal government into embryonic stem-cell research.

The anti-ban donors include Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and Republican mayor of New York; Ray Dolby, inventor of the Dolby sound system; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; and such philanthropies as the Starr Foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

"It is too early to offshore a new industry before it is born," says Andrew Grove, an Intel Corp. founder and one of the first to fund stem-cell study despite the feds' ban. Bloomberg promises $100 million to fund stem-cell and other biotech research at Johns Hopkins University, blasting the Bush regime for abrogating government's "most basic responsibility" to safeguard the public health when stem-cell breakthroughs may "save the lives of millions."

These donors should be applauded--they're truly supporting a great cause--but it's important not to lose sight of the big picture. It is unreasonable to expect wealthy philanthropists, and even individual states, to pick up the tab for misguided federal policies. Although funding biomedical research is a major federal priority, embryonic stem cells are a glaring exception for reasons of politics, not of science. Unfortunately, not only is the federal government not funding embryonic stem cell research, anything in a lab paid for with federal grant money basically can't touch embryonic stem cells with a ten-foot pole. This causes quite a few difficulties for stem cell researchers, and it lessens the impacts of these private donations.

The article notes that some of the prominent donations are coming from members of "President Bush's own Republican Party." Despite that, we shouldn't forget that although it was Bush who delivered the final death nail to the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (HR 810), both times the bill was passed, in the House and then the Senate, almost all Democrats voted in favor of it, while the vast majority of Republicans voted against it. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist delayed bringing HR 810 to a vote in the Senate for over a year, and when it was voted, passed, and then vetoed, lack of Republican support left the House several votes short of overriding the veto.

Hopefully generous private donations can sustain progress in embryonic stem cell research in the US. Clearly, though, this is not a long-term solution.