Researchers still do not know the full impact of the Bush administration’s 2001 decision to cut federal funding for the development of new embryonic stem cell lines.

But if the groundbreaking research showcased at Monday’s Beckman Symposium on Cancer and Stem Cells is any indication, Stanford researchers have charged ahead toward discovering treatments for breast, colon and prostate cancer.

The president’s moratorium on stem cell funding initially set back research at Stanford and cost the University potential scientists.

“We had to look carefully to make sure no facility, no test and no experiment used even a penny of federal dollars,” said Irv Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. “Then we had to go right away and raise $15 million to build a facility not financed by federal dollars.”

Fortunately for California researchers, state lawmakers passed Proposition 71 in 2004 to create the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and allocate $3 billion in state bonds for continued stem cell research.

Court appeals held up the proposition for three years before it was finally implemented in 2007. During that time, Weissman said, researchers from the National Cancer Institute who were planning to come to Stanford chose to go to Singapore instead.

But Law Prof. Hank Greely said the administration’s move may have actually benefited Stanford research.

“In the long run, without the Bush funding ban, we wouldn’t have the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine which was founded by Prop. 71, and Prop. 71 is pouring more funding into stem cell research than I think we would have gotten from the NIH [National Institutes of Health],” said Greely, who chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and the steering committee for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. “I don’t think we are further behind today than we would have been without Bush’s policy.”

Greely said the political climate for stem cell research funding at the federal level would likely improve with the next presidential administration.

“I do think the temperature on this is likely to be turned down some on January 20, 2009, because whoever becomes president will relax the Bush limits on funding,” he said.

Although Stanford would likely get a share of this increased federal funding, Greely said it would provide a greater benefit to other universities.

“Our peer institutions outside California will benefit more from the increased NIH funding than we will because the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is pouring more funding into Stanford’s Institute than we will ever get from the NIH,” Greely said.

The ethical controversy surrounding the issue stems from whether a human embryo can be considered a human being. Many religious conservatives believe the scientific manipulation of an embryo constitutes murder.

Weissman disagreed.

“I do not believe that any cell from human beings, including a pluripotent cell, is a born human being,” he said.

Weissman said individuals should be entitled to their own beliefs but have no right to pass a policy that denies potential cures to other individuals. He said the Bush administration has overstepped its bounds in this matter, calling the president’s 2001 mandate “inconsistent and hypocritical” in light of the approval of in-vitro fertilization clinics’ practice of disposing of about ten thousand fertilized eggs every year.

“In the end it’s the patients that had diseases which were progressing, and whose diseases could have benefited from treatment derived from stem cell lines, that suffered most,” Weissman said. “And who’s taking the moral responsibility for their lives? Certainly not the president, yet we doctors took an oath that saving those patients’ lives is our job.”

Both Weissman and Greely said that as soon as treatment from embryonic stem cells became a reality, protests against the research would stop.

“After we come up with cures,” Weissman said, “the critics won’t be objecting when someone in their family gets the disease.”