Their comments, put to paper at the request of Sen. Arlen Specter
(R-Pa.) and disclosed in conjunction with an NIH appropriations hearing
yesterday, reflect festering frustration over the policy initiated by
President Bush in 2001.
In their written comments and in testimony before the Appropriations
subcommittee on the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and
Education, chaired by Specter, several NIH officials warned that the agency
and the nation could become stragglers in the field as talented researchers
move to places where the rules are less strict and funding is more plentiful.
"Progress has been delayed by the limited number of cell lines," wrote
Elizabeth G. Nabel, the new director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood
Institute. "The NIH has ceded leadership in this field."
The science, which aims to develop treatments for a range of diseases
using cells from 5-day-old human embryos, stirs controversy because embryos
are destroyed in the process. Under the Bush policy, researchers cannot use
federal funds to conduct research on stem cells isolated after Aug. 9, 2001.
That keeps taxpayers from contributing to embryo destruction but also keeps
the federal research enterprise from exploring newer -- and in some respects
more promising -- colonies, or lines, of cells.
This summer, Congress is to consider legislation that would allow
federal funding of research using some of the thousands of embryos slated for
destruction at fertility clinics -- a change the administration has said it
opposes and that NIH leaders have until now avoided addressing. But several of
them made clear their antipathy for the status quo yesterday.
Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
complained that gaining access to the relatively few approved lines of stem
cells is "complicated and expensive."
Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, expressed frustration over "cumbersome procedures and long
waiting times" for approved cells, which in the end, he added, are often of
poor quality and die easily when they are thawed.
James F. Battey, director of the Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders, who until recently was in charge of the agency's task
force on stem cells and has made a reputation for being politic in assessing
the Bush policy, also was unusually blunt.
"The state of the science is moving very, very rapidly," Battey
testified, drawing attention to several new lines of cells developed in
Chicago that show special biomedical promise. "These cell lines, however, were
all created after August 9th, 2001, and are therefore ineligible for federal
funding," said Battey, who has applied for a job with a newly formed
California stem cell research institute that promises to fund studies on both
old and new lines of cells at many times the current level of federal support.
Perhaps inadvertently, even NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni appeared
