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And then there were two: use of hESC lines

Nature Biotechnology volume 27, pages 696–697 (2009)Cite this article

To the Editor:

Last month, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued its final guidelines defining the types of human embryonic cell (hESC) lines that would be eligible for public funding. The number of NIH-approved hESC lines available for federal funding was a bellwether issue for scientists during the Bush era prohibition. Originally, the agency announced 78 lines could be used. This was later revised downward to 64, then downward again to 21, the number most often cited in the literature1,2.

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Figure 1: Requests for hESC lines.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Andrew Cohn and Susan Langbehn of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and WiCell, Douglas Melton, Claire Fitzgerald and Brock Reeve of HSCI, and Mariana Craciun of the University of Michigan. C.T.S. was supported by funds from the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences. J.O.-S. was supported by National Science Foundation grant no. 0545634. J.B.M.'s work on this publication was made possible by Grant Number 1 UL1 RR024150-01* from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of NIH, and the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of NCRR or NIH.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program on Stem Cells in Society, Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Christopher Thomas Scott

  2. Departments of Medicine and Health Sciences Research, Bioethics Research Program, Mayo Clinic and College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

    Jennifer B McCormick

  3. Department of Sociology and Organizational Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

    Jason Owen-Smith

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  2. Jennifer B McCormick
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  3. Jason Owen-Smith
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Scott, C., McCormick, J. & Owen-Smith, J. And then there were two: use of hESC lines. Nat Biotechnol 27, 696–697 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0809-696

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