Stem cell funding & policy debate in the US

• 1993 - As per the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, Congress and President Bill Clinton give the NIH direct authority to fund human embryo research for the first time.
• 1995 - The U.S. Congress enacts into law an appropriations bill attached to which is the Dickey Amendment which prohibited federally appropriated funds to be used for research where human embryos would be either created or destroyed. This predates the creation of the first human embryonic stem cell lines.
• 1999 - After the creation of the first human embryonic stem cell lines in 1998 by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, Harriet Rabb, the top lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services, releases a legal opinion that would set the course for Clinton Administration policy. Federal funds, obviously, could not be used to derive stem cell lines (because derivation involves embryo destruction). However, she concludes that because human embryonic stem cells "are not a human embryo within the statutory definition," the Dickey-Wicker Amendment does not apply to them. The NIH was therefore free to give federal funding to experiments involving the cells themselves. President Clinton strongly endorses the new guidelines, noting that human embryonic stem cell research promised "potentially staggering benefits." And with the guidelines in place, the NIH begins accepting grant proposals from scientists.
• 02 November, 2004 - California voters approve Proposition 71, which provides $3 billion in state funds over ten years to human embryonic stem cell research.
• 2001-2006 - U.S. President George W. Bush signs an executive order which restricts federally-funded stem cell research on embryonic stem cells to the already derived cell lines. He supports federal funding for embryonic stem cell research on the already existing lines of approximately $100 million and $250 million for research on adult and animal stem cells.
• 5 May, 2006 - Senator Rick Santorum introduces bill number S. 2754, or the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act, into the U.S. Senate.
• 18 July, 2006 - The U.S. Senate passes the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act H.R. 810 and votes down Senator Santorum's S. 2754.
• 19 July, 2006 - President George W. Bush vetoes H.R. 810 (Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act), a bill that would have reversed the Clinton-era law which made it illegal for federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of an embryo.
• 07 November, 2006 - The people of the U.S. state of Missouri passed Amendment 2, which allows usage of any stem cell research and therapy allowed under federal law, but prohibits human reproductive cloning.^[42]
• 16 February, 2007 – The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine became the biggest financial backer of human embryonic stem cell research in the United States when they awarded nearly $45 million in research grants

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell