Area Researchers "Excited" By Obama's Stem Cell Reversal

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Mar 10, 2009 5:00PM

President Obama's decision to lift restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is being met with enthusiasm from local researchers. Dr. John Cunningham, chief of the pediatric hematology/oncology section at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital, said, "We're very, very excited. Obviously, we've been expecting this decision. Now that it's a reality, it unties our hands to be able to explore the use of embryonic stem cells to understand diseases better, but also to develop novel therapeutic cells" to fight diseases. Dr. John Kessler, director of the Northwestern University Stem Cell Institute, added, "There were large numbers of things we were not able to do in the lab using federal funding...It will be decades before we have our final answers to many, many diseases, but our first treatments will come in the next few years." Obama made the announcement yesterday, saying, "medical miracles do not happen simply by accident." [Sun Times]