Laboratories in England, South Korea and China are luring U.S. stem-cell researchers frustrated with federal funding restrictions and government disapproval here, said Ira Black, co-director of New Jersey’s state-financed Stem Cell Institute.
“We all know scientists who have been attracted elsewhere,” he said. “It doesn’t take long in this explosive field for everything to change.”
“Now South Korea has the kind of scientific visitors and exposure and attention that the United States was accustomed to,” Black said. “It’s an extraordinary change.”
U.S. scientists, including those in Colorado, say they’ve already lost ground in the nearly four years since President Bush limited stem-cell funding.
It will become even harder to keep up if key patents are issued elsewhere, they said, or if the brightest graduate students begin choosing Korean, Israeli and English universities over those in the United States.
“We have spent the last 50 years in this country building a biomedical research enterprise that’s the envy of the world, but with stem-cell research, we are giving that lead away,” said Sean Tipton, a spokesman with the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. House on Tuesday passed a bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., to expand public funding for the most controversial line of research using stem cells from human embryos.
Bush has said he will veto the bill, which passed 238-194, short of the two-thirds needed for a legislative override.
While federal funding is lagging, California has initiated a $3 billion research program and New Jersey has committed up to $380 million to promote stem- cell research.
Still, the U.S. now trails programs such as those in South Korea, where last week researchers announced a major breakthrough by creating personalized stem cells that may be used to treat numerous diseases, from Parkinson’s to sickle-cell anemia, without fear of a dangerous immune rejection.
The Korean work should be the Sputnik of biomedical research, said Jonathan Van Blerkom, a University of Colorado biologist and lab director of a Denver fertility clinic.
The launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957 unleashed the space race that led to the U.S. pre-eminence in space science, Van Blerkom said.
“This is where people came to train, this is where they came to work. No more,” Van Blerkom said. “Science is moveable. Centers of regenerative medicine will spring up outside of this country.”
U.S. researchers are “resilient,” said John Sladek, a neurobiologist and vice chancellor for research at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
“I would not underestimate the power of U.S. scientists to catch up,” Sladek said, “but we are falling behind.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
