Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
65 
ther progress using stem cell lines not now eligible for federal 
funds. As the editors of the Washington Post put it: “Mr. 
Bush’s compromise policy will be a reasonable one only as 
long as the existing lines are capable of supporting the re- 
search scientists need to perform. Indeed, some have ar- 
gued that by explicitly encouraging and speaking of the poten- 
tial medical value of human embryonic stem cell research, the 
President himself created the circumstances that will make the 
constraints of the policy unsustainable. "Bush’s decision was 
at its core an endorsement of the promise of human embryonic 
stem cells and their importance to the fledgling field of regen- 
erative medicine,’’ wrote one critic, and if that is the core mes- 
sage of the decision, then the resulting policy seems insuffi- 
cient.^^ 
Others, arguing on more practical grounds, claim that, re- 
gardless of the reasonableness of the principle behind the pol- 
icy, its effects will prove unbearable for American scientists, 
who will then force a reconsideration.^ The limits placed on 
funding in the current policy, several observers have predicted, 
will seriously hamper and hold back embryonic stem cell re- 
search work in the United States, perhaps causing prominent 
scientists to leave the country in search of greater support 
abroad.^® If that were to occur, it is argued, the policy would 
prove genuinely damaging to American science, and therefore 
to the national interest, and would need to be changed.^® 
In response to this specific point, some defenders of the pol- 
icy have noted that for the time being there has not been news 
of any notable migration of prominent stem cell researchers to 
foreign countries, that federal funding is now available with no 
ceiling on its amount, and that American researchers can con- 
tinue to work with private funds. 
But even apart from worries about a “brain-drain’’ in the 
field, some have argued that both the lack of funding, and par- 
ticularly the complexity of the set of conditions under which 
research using such funding may be conducted, is preventing 
progress in research and discouraging even private funding in 
the field,^® and that the lines made available simply will not be 
enough,^® or indeed that they have already proved insuffi- 
cient.^® Some argue that the very low number of applications 
submitted to the NIH for postdoctoral and training projects us- 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
