The beat goes on. The more you examine Obama-the-president, the more he resembles the guy who came before rather than Obama-the-candidate. Matt wrote last week:

On … civil rights for gays and lesbians, Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, state secrets, retroactive immunity and smothering investigations, Obama hasn’t changed a fucking thing.

Yesterday we learned that he’s also a Bush-clone when it comes to jealously guarding the names of White House visitors. Today, let’s go ahead and add stem cell research to the list of things where his presidential actions seem to fall far short of his magnificent candidate-rhetoric. So far short that he really doesn’t seem to represent any significant advance from the Bush policy.

Here’s Marion Roach, from an L.A. Times op-ed on May 10:

When he campaigned, Obama said he supported the “therapeutic cloning of stem cells.” But as president, he has already traded that position for one that some see as more politically realistic. Under the compromise plan, the president proposed that federal dollars be allowed to pay only for research on stem cell lines created from surplus fertility clinic embryos, but that funds continue to be barred from stem cell lines created in the laboratory to study particular diseases. Also barred is financial support for creating new, genetically matched stem cells for use in the treatment of disease. That is the very “therapeutic cloning” research that the president supported during his campaign.

And then there’s this May 14 analysis from Wired Science:

Under the Obama administration’s proposed rules for funding embryonic stem cell research, hundreds of existing cell lines could be ineligible, even those that qualified under President Bush.

The guidelines were written by the National Institutes of Health and are currently in draft form and expected to be finalized in July. But in their current state, they restrict funding to stem cell lines produced according to new rules that are only now being established. Few existing cell lines will meet those requirements.

“The so-called Presidential lines aren’t suitable for actual medical application,” said Patrick Taylor, deputy counsel at Children’s Hospital Boston, who criticized the NIH guidelines in a paper published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell. “But we’re talking about many, many more lines. The new lines were created with extensive ethical oversight. They’re at stake here.”

When President Barack Obama announced on March 9 that research restrictions enforced by President Bush would be overturned, scientists rejoiced. Under Bush, only 21 embryonic stem cell lines already established by August 2001 qualified for federal funding.

A few scientists chafed at Obama’s remaining restrictions on research cloning, produced through cloning, (sic) but most believed the new rules would finally let researchers to pursue the awesome medical promise of embryonic stem cells with full governmental support.

In recent weeks, however, scholars parsing the NIH’s draft guidelines, released April 18, have realized they could prove even more restrictive. At issue are informed consent requirements for women who donated eggs left unused during fertility treatments, and eventually used to generate embryonic stem cells.

Though egg collection has long been governed by widely lauded consent standards established by the National Research Council and International Society for Stem Cell Research, those standards didn’t previously meet the letter of the NIH’s proposed law.

The NIH requires consent forms that clearly mention human embryonic stem cell research, forbid donating eggs for the benefit of a specific person, and contain various other stipulations that were generally mentioned during older consent processes, but not rigorously codified. These rules could have a massive impact on existing and proposed research.

“The NIH estimated that their draft guidelines would make available 700 new lines of ESCs derived over the past 10 years,” said Sean Morrison, a University of Michigan cell biologist. “My personal guess is that unless they loosen the informed consent standard that they’re going to retroactively apply, then most of those 700 lines would not be eligible.”

Morrison said the new consent standards are good, but should be applied to future cell lines, not old ones. “The standards for informed consent evolve over time,” he said. “It would make no sense to take out lines that, 10 years ago, everyone agreed were ethically derived, just because they don’t meet the letter of the new requirements.”

I’m at a loss to understand how this hasn’t received much more attention.

Everyone has heard how Obama has moved to lead us out of the dark ages of stem cell research. Somehow nobody’s talking about how even those lines that qualified for funding under Bush may now be ineligible.

And this is despite the fact that the mainstream media has actually covered the story. For instance, The Washington Post had an article on May 25:

When President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in March, many scientists hailed the move as a long-awaited boost for one of the most promising fields of medical research.

Since then, however, many proponents have concluded that the plan could have the opposite effect, putting off-limits for federal support much of the research underway, including work that the Bush administration endorsed. “We’re very concerned,” said Amy Comstock Rick, chief executive of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which has been leading the effort to free up more federal funding for stem cell research. “If they don’t change this, very little current research would be eligible. It’s a huge issue.”