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Human embryonic stem cell research offers substantial potential medical benefits to patients suffering from spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and other illnesses, but such research has generated political and religious controversies and, in the United States, federal funding restrictions. As such, some observers fear the U.S. is falling behind other nations where scientists face fewer restrictions and are more aggressively pursuing research in the field, but such policy debate has remained largely anecdotal. But in a new study published this month in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences, Aaron Levine, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is the first to report a concrete measure indicating the U.S. is indeed falling behind other countries in the field of embryonic stem cell research. In his study titled "Trends in the geographic distribution of human embryonic stem-cell research," Levine, who is part of the Woodrow Wilson School's program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP), used scholarly communications data from the first six years in the development of human embryonic stem cell research and five other less contentious biomedical technologies to compare the international distribution of research in these fields. Levine's study reports data indicating that the U.S. share of human embryonic stem cell research publications was significantly less than the U.S. share for the five less contentious biomedical-research areas. The United States share of human embryonic stem cell research publications fell sharply to 30% in 2003 and remained near this reduced level in 2004. Asian countries, in contrast, were credited with unusually large shares of human embryonic stem cell research publications. The complete article is available on the Politics and the Life Sciences web site."Aaron is an outstanding student in our STEP program who was able to combine his previous training in molecular biology and genomics with what he's learning in the field of public policy here as a graduate student, to come up with such superlative research," said Lee Silver, a professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and Levine's dissertation advisor, as well as a faculty associate at the School's program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy. "He conceived and carried out this study on his own, in part because we both knew of the widespread and totally unsupported anecdotal view that the U.S. was falling behind in the field of human embryonic stem cell research. Aaron went out in search of evidence to either support or negate this hypothesis, and he has successfully done just that." Levine created datasets of research publications related to human embryonic stem cell research and to five other life-sciences technologies, and then compared these datasets systematically. Searches were conducted using the Science Citation Index Expanded database, which indexed approximately 5,900 journals across 150 scientific disciplines. Levine's study was also awarded the prestigious Association for Politics and Life Sciences Graduate Student Paper Award for the year 2005, at a recent Association conference in Washington, D.C. The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences annually awards a prize for the best paper written by a graduate student on a topic related to public policy or politics and one of the life sciences. |
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