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SAN FRANCISCO — One of the nation’s top embryonic stem cell scientists is leaving the country to work overseas, and the university that employed him has temporarily halted new research in the area. 

Citing an increasingly hostile political climate in the United States surrounding such research, University of California, San Francisco biology professor Roger Pedersen said Monday he’s moving later this summer to Cambridge University in England. 

England publicly supports Pedersen’s research, which requires the destruction of days-old embryos, while the United States government currently does not.  

The U.S. government will not fund any research that destroys or harms an embryo, and the Bush administration is considering whether to make that ban permanent.  

Private funding of embryonic stem cell research is legal. 

“I was faced with an irresistible career opportunity, and the possibility of carrying out my research on human embryonic stem cell research with public support,” Pedersen said in a press release issued by the university. He declined further comment. Pedersen was working with excess frozen embryos destined for disposal that were obtained from fertility clinics. 

Fearing the university was running up against the federal funding ban, Pedersen and his nine stem cell research colleagues at UCSF stopped destroying embryos in April and confined their research to existing stem cells in their lab, UCSF spokeswoman Jennifer O’Brien said. On Monday, the university said it would not start any new stem cell research until the program moves off campus by Aug. 1. 

UCSF always has relied on biotechnology company Geron Inc. to pay for the equipment, materials and salaries needed for the stem cell research. But by April, Pedersen became convinced the federal ban also extended to “indirect costs” such as electricity, janitorial services and bookkeeping. 

UCSF said Geron always paid for these indirect costs, but that a National Institutes of Health policy maintains that federal and private contributions are inseparable. Haile Debas, dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, declined to comment directly, but said in a press release: 

“We strongly support work on embryonic stem cells, but are awaiting word and instruction from the National Institutes of Health and the federal government on their decision on whether they will support this work.” O’Brien said the stem cell researchers have found a new home and a new director of the program, whom she declined to identify. 

The University of Wisconsin made a similar off-campus move with its embryonic stem cell research in October 1999.  

James Thomson first extracted stem cells from fertility-clinic supplied embryos at Wisconsin in 1998, and that university continues to be the chief manufacturer and supplier of stem cells, which proponents say hold the potential to cure a wide range of diseases and ailments. 

Stem cells are formed in the first few days after an egg is fertilized with sperm.  

Stem cells are indistinguishable from one another, yet they grow into 200 different adult cells that build the human body. Researchers believe they can manipulate stem cells to grow into adult cells of their choosing, which then could be used to treat disorders in everything from the brain to the heart. 

Some U.S. supporters of the research fear a “brain drain” will occur in this country if President Bush decides to prohibit the use of public funds for embryonic stem cell research. Menlo Parkbased Geron, which funded Thomson’s research, said it is making contingency plans to move some of its stem cell research to Scotland, where it owns the company that cloned Dolly the sheep. 

“There’s a real impact here for us and for society if Bush decides not to apply NIH funding for this,” Geron CEO Michael Okarma said in an interview last week. “But the work will go on one way or another. We have an operation in the UK and that can be dramatically scaled up if we have to take this research to a more enlightened environment.” 

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http://www.ucsf.edu