The executive order signed by President Barack Obama on March 9 ending restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research thoroughly revamps standard operating procedure at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
A ban put in place in 2001 severely limited government funding of work with these pluripotent cells, so the research largely depended on private contributions. These two streams of funding, public and private, and the research they supported had to be kept strictly separate. “We had to do an enormous amount in terms of monitoring purchases and setting up separate accounting procedures,” said David Scadden, one of two scientific directors of the institute and the Gerald and Darlene Jordan professor of medicine at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Duplicate pieces of equipment had to be purchased and had stickers on them indicating whether they could be used for embryonic stem cell research. Now all of that is gone.”
“More important is the symbolic impact,” Scadden said. “Stem cell scientists no longer operate under a cloud of political ideology.”
In a letter posted on the institute website (www.hsci.harvard.edu), Scadden and Douglas Melton, the institute’s other scientific director, write, “Science as a way of knowing is a very powerful tool for good, and it is liberating to hear that science, not political ideology, will guide the Obama administration in its decisions.”
A day after the President’s order, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a new undergraduate major focusing on stem cell science. The Harvard department featuring this discipline, Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB), is cochaired by Scadden and Melton, who is also a Howard Hughes investigator and the Thomas Dudley Cabot professor in the natural sciences at Harvard. SCRB was the first cross-school department at the University, based at both FAS and the Medical School.
