Obama links scientific research to protecting 'free thinking'

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's orders on science and stem cell research have a symbolic importance that's even greater than their impact on science, say policy experts.

"Promoting science isn't just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry," Obama said Monday at a White House ceremony. The president signed an executive order lifting federal funding limits on human embryonic stem cell research and a presidential memorandum seeking to insulate scientific advisors from political interference.

The action eliminates funding restrictions imposed by President Bush in 2001 and addresses the controversy over the politicization of science that threaded through all eight years of the Bush administration.

"We view what has happened with stem cell research as one (example) of the failure to think carefully about federal support of science and the use of science," says Nobel-Prize winning virologist Harold Varmus of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Obama seeks to shift science from political football to supporting evidence in upcoming debates over energy, environment and economics, says Varmus.

"What we are seeing, what really is important is a respect for evidence in decision-making that has been lacking," says bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania, who served on Obama's transition team. Besides stem cells, science wrangles over endangered species, climate change, pollution, national security cropped up throughout the Bush administration.

"The president restated the centrality of science to the issues," said Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who attended the ceremony. "I've never seen the scientific community so pleased by a presidential action," says Leshner. "It really is a historical attempt to establish the clear role of science in underlying policy."

The executive order lifts Bush's Aug. 9, 2001 decision to withhold federal support of research on newly collected colonies of embryonic stem cells, the master cells from which all tissues are formed. Bush, decrying the destruction of embryos necessary to harvest the cells, limited funding to research involving 21 stem cell colonies — called lines — already in existence.