PRESIDENT Bush’s policy on embryonic stem cell research is in the firing line again, after the release on 4 March of 17 new embryonic stem cell lines. Douglas Melton of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University has made the new lines freely available, but under Bush’s rules federally funded researchers remain banned from working with them. They can only use ESC lines derived before 9 August 2001, and of the 78 ESC lines that qualified only 15 are available.
Moreover, the president’s panel of bioethics advisers, the Council on Bioethics, now has a majority against ESC research. Pro-research…
