San Francisco

The US government has published a list of the 64 human embryonic stem-cell lines that can be used by publicly funded researchers under the Bush administration's new rules.

Publication of the list, which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on its website on Monday, ended weeks of head-scratching among researchers over the large number of stem-cell lines that President George W. Bush claimed existed in his 9 August speech. The list names 10 companies and research labs worldwide that have derived cell lines.

But questions remain about the nature and quality of many of the cell lines, and not all the labs are ready to give the cells out.

The highest concentration of stem-cell lines is in Sweden — 19 at Göteborg University and 5 at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Another 10 cell lines are at two centres in India, with 4 more in Israel.

But CyThera, a San Diego-based company developing stem-cell therapies for degenerative diseases, says it does not know when it will be ready to distribute its nine lines. "We first need to characterize them fully," says its chief operating officer Lutz Giebel.

Audrey Chapman, a science-policy official at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says the list only begins to address the concerns outlined in an association statement produced on 17 August (see Nature 412, 753–754; 2001).

"The question really is how much more the NIH knows but is not ready to share, or whether they have shared all they know," she says.

→ http://www.nih.gov