[DBrow]

There are no limits on cell lines. Just funding.

If there are such magnificent benefits waiting just around the corner, why is it that taxes must be used to get across the finish line? The normal capitalist risk-invention- profit model should work.

Or is it the vast amount of progress shown by more enlightened countries that use their citizens' tax dollars? Are US investigators embarrassed that other labs able to use the public money have so much better success? /s

If these researchers are truly looking to mankind's better interests, perhaps moving to a country that allows taxes to be used for fetal stem cell research and no limits on cell lines would give them the clinical advancements they claim would result if we did it here in the USA.

Or maybe the tax money is not the key. Applying the Razor of Sir Ockham....

[AmishDude]

Agreed. This isn't highly theoretical physics. This is stuff that's supposed to have direct, applicable results. That's the appeal. But if it did, companies would be sinking billions in it.

Here's the bigger secret: Academic research is, by definition, public. You can't withhold it from the world. So if we pay for it, the whole world uses it.

If the EU pays for it, we use it too.

Time for the rest of the world to chip in.