Alan Trounson, president of the $3 billion California stem cell agency, is minimizing the impact of President-elect Obama's plan to ease federal restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research. Trounson (see photo) was quoted today in a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Gautam Naik and Robert Lee Hotz. The article was headlined "Obama's Promise on Stem Cell Doesn't Ensure New War on Diease." This morning the story appeared prominently on the main page of the WSJ web site but on page A9 of the print publication.
Trounson's remarks dealt both with the impact of California's research effort, now the world's largest source of funding for hESC science, and Obama's stem cell plans.
Concerning the Golden State, Trounson said,
"We are at such a high pace and we have so much funding ourselves that there will be no real competition to our leadership."Trounson also said,
"The incremental money from NIH will be relatively small because of the economy."The WSJ piece said that "two big questions" must be answered at the federal level.
"How much federal money will be made available for the research? And how quickly can America's major science-funding agency, the National Institutes of Health, take on a leadership role in a field where it has only modest experience and whose funding efforts have lagged behind several state initiatives.The WSJ story may be limited to subscribers only. If you would like a copy, please email me at djensen@californiastemcellreport.com
"'To make stem-cell science take off, it needs something equivalent to Nixon's war on cancer,' says James Thomson, a stem-cell scientist at the University of Wisconsin who created the first human embryonic-stem-cell line in 1998. 'But because of today's economic realities, it's not going to happen for at least a couple of years.'"
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