AFTER a long delay, researchers in the US who get federal funding have
learned which human embryonic stem cells they will be allowed to work with. The
National Institutes of Health has at last released the list of 72 approved cell
lines from 11 private and public institutions from around the world.
President Bush announced in August that federally funded research would be
allowed with a few existing cell lines. But the NIH’s stem cell registry
(http://escr.nih.gov) provides little information about these cell lines. Only a
few genetic markers are given even for the most studied lines, and it…
