By Angela Nitzke-Martin

I have no doubt that at some point after having my blood drawn, I have likened the experience to torture. Those minutes spent prospecting for gold in my evidently intractable veins is certainly unpleasant, and on occasion painful, but torturous — no. It is an attempt to add drama to a pretty boring story, and absurd to suggest that a medical professional would support suffering that wasn’t ultimately in the patient’s best interest. After all, they do have to take an oath.

Maybe that is why “Medical Complicity in Torture,” the title of a lecture given by New York University’s Allen Keller was a bit shocking. CIA physicians and psychologists seem out of place in military prisons, but they do play a role in interrogations and were present at Guantanamo Bay. Should medical professionals participate in torture or enhanced interrogation? “Moral and scientific reasons ultimately lead to the same conclusion: That, no, we shouldn’t be doing this,” said Keller, an associate professor of medicine and director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture.

Keller spoke at the University of Chicago on Wednesday as part of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series. In his lecture, Keller drew from vast experience dealing with torture victims and the report he coauthored for Physicians for Human Rights titled, “Aiding Torture.” The paper cites the CIA Inspector General’s report released in 2004 that said psychologists not only monitored enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reactions.

It is impossible to separate the physical, psychological and social dimensions of health, said Keller. “The consequences of torture are all interrelated.” Prisoners who are not mortally wounded may still experience intense psychiatric trauma with long lasting effects. Preventing death or severe injury does not preclude inflicting harm.

Although not as mind-boggling as what the definition of “is” is, there is still debate about what constitutes torture. We have the UN’s definition and the American Medical Association’s definition, but it boils down to something much simpler for Keller. “If it looks like torture, smells like torture, it’s probably torture,” said Keller.

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5:00 p.m. - Biomedicine and Bracketology

Here’s the final report from today’s session, join us again tomorrow for a full Halloween day of evolutionary science and philosophy! Also, continue to follow PZ Myers of Pharyngula and Skip Evans of Wisconsin Citizens for Science for their reports on the conference.

Both talks in the final session of the day focused on how the incredible advances in gathering genetic information over the last decade have done much to shake up the worlds of genetics and evolutionary biology. As we’ve written about previously, the 1959 conference helped solidify what’s known as the modern synthesis of evolution that incorporated the then-new information about DNA, genes and molecular mechanisms of inheritance, an arrangement that forever married the two fields. Well, could the participants in that conference have predicted that 50 years later we would have a reasonably complete genome for humans, not to mention 43 other vertebrate species? And did they know how much trouble it would cause?

Eric Lander, who was one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, said he felt slightly out of place at a conference about Darwin, but the modern synthesis marriage sometimes makes strange bedfellows! Regardless, Lander’s talk was a great primer on how the dogma of genetics has been forever altered by what we learned from the HGP and the genomes of other animals: that we have far fewer genes than we thought (~20,000 vs. previous estimates of 100,000), that much of what is handed down between generations is “non-coding” DNA that doesn’t make proteins, that those “non-coding” sections may create important regulatory elements that help organisms develop. Lander, who described himself as a biomedical scientist, said much of what has been found since the explosion of genetic data has been bad news for medical geneticists - many disease-associated alleles have been found, but most have very marginal effects on the probability of a person developing that disease. But Lander said it was a glass half-full/half-empty situation:

“Those people who want to do personal genomics - take your DNA and tell you your risk of diabetes - they’re in trouble. This is not going to be the best way to do that,” Lander said. “But if I want to understand what diabetes is about…I start to get clues to the pathways that matter to diabetes.”

The final talk of the day covered how genetics has caused a similar reshuffling in the field of phylogeny - the science of organizing life into “trees” that show the evolution and relationships of species. Philip Ward, from UC-Davis, talked about the durability of the “Tree of Life” simile, which Darwin readily used in Origin of Species - the only figure in the book is an early phylogenic tree. Modern phylogeny produces beautifully complex trees that look like 10,000-team basketball tournaments run in reverse, with the winner being life’s common ancestor. But as biologists have turned to genetics to build these trees, they’ve found that they lead to completely different trees than the ones built from morphology, the physical characteristics of organisms.

One reason for this is a tricky effect called convergence - two species that are not closely related and live continents apart could form a resemblance because they evolved in similar environments. Ward studies a type of ant that is found in both Asia and America, and morphology would suggest that they are closely related species despite being so far apart geographically. However, genetic data showed the ants were more distantly related than previously could have been estimated from their looks, suggesting they evolved to look similar due to their similar environments, without a recent common ancestor.

But the Tree of Life remains a strong structural model, Ward said. So strong, in fact, that it has been adopted by creationists, who describe an “orchard of life” of animals that evolved after Noah’s flood. As with most mentions of creation “science” at the meeting, Ward’s slides about these theories drew mostly giggles from an audience decidedly on the side of Darwin, even as genetics reveals a world more complex than he ever could have imagined.

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And so Neuroscience 2009 comes to an end, and it’s time to put away my badge, rest my weary feet and note-taking hand and think about biology below the neck again. Here’s the final installment of our live coverage, but come back tomorrow for a roundup of the conference with highlights, loose observations and links to other people’s thoughts on the conference. Thanks for reading!

2:30 PM - The Final Talk

The schedule may say that Neuroscience 2009 runs through the end of the day today, but judging by how many suitcase-toting scientists were jumping in airport cabs this afternoon, a small portion of the 30,000+ attendance makes it to the very end. Indeed, even the main stage ends its conference early, shutting down after a talk by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine’s Eric Nestler, an expert in the field of molecular psychiatry.

Nestler’s research focuses on the gritty details of how drugs of abuse change the expression of a person’s genes - yes, it was another addiction talk, and the former addiction researcher that I am, it was great to see the topic getting so much attention this year. In the addiction press conference I attended yesterday, Nestler hinted at a bombshell idea - frequent users of addictive drugs such as cocaine, heroin or alcohol may change the mechanics of their genes so permanently, the modifications could be passed on to their children. This “inheritable addiction” has already been observed in lab rats, Nestler said, mirroring similar results seen with the offspring of obese rats (which I talked about on Monday).

But that data must be too fresh for mass consumption, despite Nestler telling a roomful of reporters about it the day before. His talk today focused on the steps leading up to that discovery, carefully examining how repeated cocaine increases or decreases the activity of hundreds of genes in the reward pathway of the brain. Those long-lasting changes, which can cause cells of the reward pathway to actually grow and change shape, help explain why addiction is such a difficult condition to treat - it may require a complete re-re-structuring of the brain.

Much of the addiction research I’ve talked about this week has taken place in animals, but before Nestler’s talk, I came across a rare experiment that looks at the behavioral effects of a commonly-used drug in humans. It might seem strange that we know a ton about the specific genes that are up or down-regulated by cocaine, but not so much about its effects upon humans, but that’s due to procedural reasons - it’s quite hard to get approval for a study that gives illegal drugs to humans.

Michael Ballard, from the University of Chicago laboratory of Harriet DeWit, was trying to fill in at least one of those gaps in the research by testing the effects of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) to presumably eager volunteers. Ballard then tested the subjects’ ability to judge facial expressions and determine the emotional content of pictures and personality trait words while they were under the influence of the drug. Interestingly, higher doses of THC caused the subjects to misjudge the facial expressions they were shown, suggesting an effect of the drug on social perception. The other tests were normal during the drug effect, but when brought back to the laboratory a week later, the subjects showed a decreased ability to remember neutral and negative personality traits, possibly indicating that their memories of the drug effect were biased toward happier stimuli. Ballard hopes to continue that research into other drug types - he’s currently testing amphetamine - to give the field of addiction research much-needed, laboratory-controlled human data to make sense of the flood of animal experiments.

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Convincing people to stop smoking is no easy task, as family members or friends of smokers know all too well. But consider a situation where roughly three-quarters of active smokers find themselves ready to quit, willing to make that all-important first step of deciding to go smoke-free. When is this short window of vulnerability and motivation open? The time is when a smoker is in the hospital, said Dr. Lisa Shah, instructor in the section of hospital medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center, a time when the patient is also surrounded by the infrastructure needed to nurture a desire to stop smoking into a successful change of behavior.

But Shah, a researcher focused on studying inpatient tobacco cessation, said in her Medicine Grand Rounds presentation Tuesday afternoon that many doctors miss this opportunity to help their patients kick a dangerous habit. In fact, it was right there on a slide titled The Missed Opportunity, which laid out why inpatients find themselves ready to quit: the no-smoking policies in place at hospitals*, the shock of being hospitalized for an illness that may be a direct result of smoking, and the isolation from environmental cues at home or work that may trigger the urge to smoke.

“For the smokers we see here, often one big barrier to quitting smoking is that they have family members and friends who also smoke cigarettes, Shah said. “Social smoking is a huge impetus to smoke, and makes it hard to quit. So hospitalization helps them succeed in quitting smoking without the temptation.”

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Whether you call it pop, soda, a soft drink or lower-case coke, sugary, carbonated beverages have become a staple of the American diet. And as we all know, the American diet is not exactly the healthiest. So with obesity racking up an estimated $150 billion a year in health care costs - which, as you may have heard, is in the news lately - some researchers have considered whether Coke, Pepsi and their sucrose-packed brethren should be subject so the same type of “sin tax” that has been applied in the past to alcohol and tobacco by some governments.

Here in ScienceLife’s home state of Illinois, carbonated soft drinks (as well as most candy) were recently reclassified from being considered as food to “general merchandise” - a seemingly innocuous change that actually means a sales tax increase from 2.25 percent to 10.25 percent in Chicago. In Illinois, the switch was justified as a way to generate much-needed revenue for state services, but could it also have a direct public health benefit by discouraging people, particularly children and teenagers, from drinking hundreds of calories in soda pop each day?

In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, seven public health experts assess the best methods of improving public health through taxation of soft drinks. Soda is already taxed in 33 states, according to the article, at an average of 5.2%. But research indicates that those taxes have only marginal effects on soda consumption and obesity. One recent study out of UIC found only “weakly significant” effects of tax rate on the body mass index of children “at risk” of being overweight. In NEJM, the authors immediately state that the current tax rates are too small to have an effect on consumption - after all, a 5% tax on a 75-cent can of Coke is less than 4 cents, hardly enough to get someone to switch to water.

But the authors go on to suggest different methods of taxation that could be more effective in motivating people to change their beverage behavior. Rather than imposing an increased sales tax on all soda purchases, the authors suggest a tax of 1 cent per ounce on beverages with “added caloric sweetener” - your standard sugary Coke or Pepsi, but not your Nutrasweet-infused Diet versions. So a 12 oz. can of soda would set you back 12 cents, and a convenience-store fountain drink behemoth would cost almost a dollar extra, but if you opt for the diet version, no tax. Thus, the authors hope the tax will encourage (or financially push) consumers to make healthier decisions rather than merely opting for cheaper sugary drinks.

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The question was a welcome one, given the heated, exhausting health care debate that has raged through the summer: On the day after health care reform (whatever form it takes), what are the potential stumbling blocks and opportunities?

That’s how moderator Michele Norris (of NPR’s All Things Considered) thoughtfully began the panel at the University of Chicago-curated “Chicago Contributes” health care forum, held Thursday in Washington, DC less than a day after President Barack Obama’s speech to Congress. Reform supporters might consider that question to be a jinx as Obama and the Democrats struggle to find a consensus plan, but it allowed the forum’s panelists to clear the political fog and put the focus back where it should be - on the challenging questions of access and cost reduction that face modern American medicine.

After a keynote address by Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, echoed many of the points the President made himself the night before, the stage was turned over to a national group of university experts that were grappling with these issues long before health care became the season’s political hot potato. The importance of access to health care, not just insurance, was summarized nicely (and immediately) by Gerard Clancy, Dean of the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa College of Medicine: “If we have 40-50 million people now with health care coverage, who’s going to take care of them?”

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Last night, President Barack Obama addressed Congress about the need for health care reform, and today the University of Chicago is presenting a timely forum in Washington, DC, on the subject of access to health care. With a keynote address from Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and a panel that includes several health care policy experts, the event promises to be a interesting discussion of how universities are participating in the current national health care conversation. In cooperation with the UofC News Office, we’ll be running a live-stream of the event from 12 noon Chicago time, along with live, updating commentary from blog editor Jeremy Manier and Medical Center communications director John Easton at the forum, and Rob Mitchum, who will be watching the stream with you. Below the video feed and live blog you can find the agenda and the participants in the health care forum, or you can read more about the Chicago Contributes event (which will also feature an education forum following the health care discussion) here:

Keynote: Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary
Panel: “Access After Health Care Reform”
Moderator: Michele Norris, Host of NPR’s All Things Considered

Panelists:

• Eric Whitaker
  • Executive VP, Strategic Affiliations, and Associate Dean of Community-based Research at the University of Chicago Medical Center
• Pedro Jose Greer
  • Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and Chair of the Department of Humanities, Health and Society, Florida International University School of Medicine
• Gerard Clancy
  • President, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, and Dean, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa College of Medicine
• Kavita Patel
  • Director of Policy of the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs
• Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D.
  • Executive Chairman & CEO, Abraxis Health, and Executive Director, UCLA Wireless Health Institute, University of California, Los Angeles

Three years ago, University of Chicago Medical Center physicians spotted an unusual genetic mutation in 6-year-old Lilly Jaffe - a finding that meant the girl could switch from painful insulin injections to pills as a means of controlling her Type I diabetes. Last Friday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a state bill bearing Lilly’s name, which will establish the first mandated statewide diabetes registry in the United States, an effort that researchers hope will help more diabetic children receive the proper treatment for their disease and help decode previously-unknown genetic causes of diabetes.

Illinois House Bill 2481, known unofficially as Lilly’s Law, originated with Rep. Tom Cross (R-Oswego) and passed both houses of the Illinois General Assembly by unanimous vote — no small achievement in the state’s current political climate. The bill establishes a registry of Illinois children diagnosed with neonatal diabetes before the age of 12 months, to be used by clinicians and diabetes researchers. Physicians will now be required to report any such cases to the Illinois Department of Public Health and, if the family agrees, will also report results of lab tests that measure blood sugar control in the diabetic children.

Dr. Louis Philipson, medical director of the Kovler Diabetes Center at the University of Chicago, helped Cross craft the bill along with U. of C. professor of medicine and human genetics Graeme Bell, and Dr. Siri Atma Greeley, instructor in pediatric endocrinology. Philipson said the registry will be beneficial in both the clinic and the laboratory, helping doctors connect children with the most appropriate and least disruptive treatments, while also pointing scientists toward potential new genes that underlie neonatal diabetes.

“There’s a double benefit here,” said Dr. Louis Philipson, medical director of the Kovler Diabetes Center at the University of Chicago. “It will not only help patients, but we can also learn more about the various genes that cause diabetes.” read more

This was a busy week for biomedical news. The National Institutes of Health got a new nominee for its director, Francis Collins; the NIH finalized new rules for funding of research on embryonic stem cells; and swine flu got a new quasi-official name: “Pandemic H1N1 2009.”

Of the three events, the naming of Francis Collins as NIH chief may have the biggest long-lasting effects. Pending his confirmation, Collins will take over NIH at a time of rebounding budgets fueled by recovery funds, setting the course for the world’s most powerful research body.

But Collins’ nomination is causing more controversy than I would have thought possible.

I’ve talked with Collins in his prior capacity as director of the Human Genome Project and more recently in connection with his interest in reconciling science and religion. Collins, an evangelical Christian, has drawn heavy criticism from scientific atheists like PZ Myers and our own Jerry Coyne. Myers clearly admires Collins’ organizational skills, but describes him as a “lovable dufus” when it comes to issues of religion and some scientific principles. Coyne says he “can’t help but be a bit worried” about some of Collins’ religious views, including his conviction that the evolution of humans was in some sense inevitable. The psychologist and author Steven Pinker said he has “serious misgivings” about Collins’ appointment, calling him “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.”

Based on my interviews with Collins and reading of his work, most of these criticisms seem unfair.

It’s certainly true that Collins wants to reconcile religion with, for example, evolutionary biology. And this is something that naturalists such as Coyne and Richard Dawkins say cannot be done. But time and again in my lengthy talk with Collins about his book “The Language of God,” he stressed that he’s never thought religion should modify what science shows to be true. “I believe in truth, and I think we shouldn’t be afraid of truth,” he said. “If you believe in God as the creator of the universe, that can hardly be threatened by our efforts to understand how nature works.”

As Chris Wilson wrote this week in Slate, “Most of the time, Collins starts with the science and then reconciles the religion with it.” For a scientist to take issue with this approach seems gratuitous, bordering on intolerant.

On the other hand, like many of the critics I take issue with some of the content on Collins’ website for his BioLogos Foundation. The idea that God affects evolution or other natural processes through unmeasurable influences on quantum events strikes me as a game of three-card Monte - “Oops, you thought God had to act through overt miracles, but actually he was hiding with Heisenberg the whole time. Thanks for playing.”

But even on the BioLogos site, Collins and his crew make some fair points. A section called “God’s Relationship to Time” claims that as creator of the universe, God also would have created time, and would exist in some sense outside of time. This is relevant to the question of divine action, since it raises the possibility that such influence does not consist of supernatural intervention but is part of a larger scheme that was “baked into the cake” of the universe from the start. This seems to me more fundamental than a simple case of three-card monty. It’s a question that thinkers from St. Augustine to Heidegger have grappled with. It certainly doesn’t suggest an “anti-scientific” mindset.

As Wilson notes, for the most part Collins targets issues that seem by definition to be unsolvable by science; he’s not squeezing God into gaps that science has not yet solved, and he’s not challenging any facts that science has revealed. For example, Collins is understandably curious about the origins of life, but he dismisses the idea that because those origins are still murky, they require a divine explanation. When it comes to hard-core biology, Collins does not look for answers in Genesis.

This indicates a species of faith that Collins’ atheist critics share. It’s the faith that the dogged pursuit of empirically solvable questions will lead to answers we can trust, and that most of nature’s interesting mysteries will yield to rational explanations. That’s the sort of faith that should serve an NIH director well.

I don’t mean to gush with advance praise for the Pritzker School’s commencement speaker, Dr. Atul Gawande, but he really does seem to be everywhere lately. First he wrote that great New Yorker piece on the deep puzzle of how some communities can spend so much on medical care without improving health outcomes. Then this week the New York Times reported that Gawande’s piece is at the center of White House discussions about health care reform. Veteran health policy reporter Robert Pear writes that the piece has become “required reading” among President Obama’s staff, and that Obama cited it in a recent meeting with two dozen senators, saying, “This is what we’ve got to fix.”

So needless to say, we’re curious about what Gawande will have to say here tomorrow morning. For clues about his address, here’s a Wall Street Journal blog report on his commencement speech earlier this week at the Harvard School of Public Health. If it’s any indication, he should have some interesting thoughts on modern medicine’s central paradox: The more sophisticated and profound our scientific discoveries become, the more difficult it can be to make those cutting-edge treatments widely available.

The news of unusual swine flu cases in Mexico and the American southwest has raised concerns that the outbreaks could herald a new flu pandemic - though the anxiety level in this AP story on today’s news seems just a bit too high at this stage. Something about the tone smacks of that movie “The Andromeda Strain” - “it’s something we’ve never seen before…”

It’s important to be vigilant, but overreaction also can have costs. In 1976, the CDC instituted an emergency immunization program in response to an outbreak of swine flu. The vaccine they used may or may not have been the cause of an uptick that year in cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (see this for an account of the 1976 experience by the former directors of the CDC and the immunization program).

President Obama has a history of interest in flu pandemic preparedness. He co-wrote a 2005 op-ed in the New York Times on pandemic measures, and later that year I interviewed him on that subject for the Chicago Tribune. You can see the transcript here. Two passages from that interview may offer clues about how Obama’s administration will handle the latest outbreak: 

Even when the SARS scare struck, the losses were in multiple billions of dollars. And that proved to be a false alarm essentially. If something like this genuinely occurred, you’d see global trade come to a standstill. And in addition to obviously the loss of life, the breakdown of our health systems, the economic consequences would be huge.

…you hate to be Chicken Little on this thing - no pun intended. But this is actually one of those situations where getting people a little scared, and certainly getting our government a little scared is probably a useful thing. And as I said, whatever investments we make are not going to be wasted, because the likelihood of pandemic is so high, even if it isn’t this particular pandemic. 

Perhaps Obama will see the issue differently as president than he did as a senator. But his instincts seem similar to those of the people who ran the 1976 immunization program - “When lives are at stake, it is better to err on the side of overreaction than underreaction.” If this outbreak continues, we may see another test of that idea.

This announcement from the National Cancer Institute could be very big news at cancer research centers like this one. The increase, which NCI director John E. Niederhuber described in a speech at the meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, will be part of the economic stimulus package.

Here’s an interesting passage from the story in The Scientist:

In 2009 the agency will be able to fund the top 16% of grant applications instead of only the top 12%–last year’s payline–based on budgetary increases alone, Niederhuber said. The NCI may be able to fund 25% of applications with the added $1.3 billion that the agency is set to receive as part of the $10 billion in stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health. 

But raising the payline is only half the story. “Economic stimulus funds give us the chance to be visionary,” Niederhuber said, adding that the NCI will seek to fund more young, first-time investigators, and will emphasize prevention and early diagnosis in the research it supports in the future. “Patients still need better treatments, better prevention, and better early detection,” he said. “We must recommit ourselves to answering that call.” 

This was a long but exhilarating day for Janet Rowley, who was at President Obama’s side as he signed the executive order creating a new stem-cell policy. I caught up with her by phone in D.C. this afternoon as she waited for her plane back to Chicago. Rowley said the day’s events made her think back to the first meeting of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, where her views in favor of embryonic stem cell research put her at odds with the administration.

“To be there today at the White House and see this signing, for me it was like coming full circle,” Rowley said. “When you saw the enthusiasm of the scientists who were there, the people from Congress, the patient advocates who were so important in keeping this issue alive during the dark years, if you will. It was just an unbelievable experience.”

For Rowley and other researchers, one of the most welcome themes of the day was what Rowley called “the de-linking of science and politics.” In fact, despite the historic nature of the stem-cell policy change, the other document Obama signed may have more far-reaching effects - a presidential memorandum on scientific integrity. That directive calls for more transparency in science and technology issues before the government, without suppression of findings for political reasons.

Although the Bush administration is over, the Council on Bioethics is slated to last until at least November of this year, and Rowley continues to serve on it. She said she believes some of the group’s reports have made an impact, if only to reflect how divided the country was on many issues in bioethics. Such groups can continue to address legitimate moral concerns; as Rowley said, “It’s very important because scientists have to reassure the rest of the country that we’re not out to make a bunch of clones or zombies.”

Another note: Friday’s analysis of the next steps for the NIH is up at the Huffington Post’s Chicago site; you can see it here.

The Washington Post reported this afternoon that President Obama plans to lift the Bush-era restrictions on stem-cell research funding via executive order on Monday. Now comes the hard part - implementing a stem-cell policy that’s meaningful, has full ethical protections and unlocks the scientific talent that’s been held back the last eight years.

One insider point to watch on Monday is whether someone from the National Institutes of Health will help explain the new funding channels for this research. It’s a question of some urgency. Just this week, the NIH released a set of “challenge grant” topics that are eligible for a pool of $200 million as part of the new federal economic stimulus act. The NIH site describes the qualifying projects as those which “address specific scientific and health research challenges in biomedical and behavioral research that will benefit from significant 2-year jumpstart funds.” Embryonic stem-cell research would seem a natural fit - especially since the Bush administration held it back for years - but it’s not clear yet that Obama’s rule change has come in time for stem-cell grant seekers to get a share of the stimulus money. That’s one reason why Obama’s delay in announcing changes to the stem-cell policy was a bit puzzling. Many observers - including me - expected him to lift the restrictions his first week in office.

Around research centers like the University of Chicago, stem-cell scientists are poring over such details. I just spoke with John Cunningham, M.D., a specialist in pediatric stem-cell transplantation, who directed me to the brand-new NIH list of “Highest Priority Challenge Topics.” (You can see a more researcher-oriented application guide here.) Stem-cell research is on the list, but not specifically the embryonic stem-cell research that’s been subject to Bush’s limits. I count five topics that relate to iPS cells - short for induced pluripotent stem cells - which were discovered in 2007 and seem to have many of the properties of embryonic stem cells but are derived from adult cells. That’s fantastic because iPS cells deserve more study. But embryonic stem-cell research never appears by name, except to say that “iPS cells act like embryonic stem cells.”

This is an important point because as Cunningham said, “One of the things that lifting the current ban should allow us to do is really test whether iPS cells and embryonic stem cells have similar properties.” In theory the current challenge grant list could include work with embryonic stem cells, since some of the topics are broad enough to encompass work with several different cell types. For example, Topic 11, “Regenerative Medicine,” contains a broad opportunity to “Develop cell-based therapies for cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases.” That could cover some work with embryonic stem cells, as could some of the items under the general category of stem cells.

But none of this is set in stone. What the president says on Monday may signal whether broader embryonic stem-cell funding will begin with the stimulus package, or whether scientists - and patients - will have to wait longer to start seeing more progress. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s a take on the news in an e-mail from embryonic stem-cell researcher and friend of the blog George Q. Daley, M.D., of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston: “I am brimful of hope and excitement about the announcement on Monday. I’ll be there, and I expect Obama to lift the restrictions and usher in a whole new era of scientific openness and opportunity for stem cell research. The future looks bright indeed for stem cell research.”