I'm Anastasia Glova.

Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 18th.

The White House has signaled in no uncertain terms that President Bush will veto the stem

cell bill that passed the House of Representatives last week and is now in the Senate.

Meanwhile, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer has offered to put a $2 billion bond issue on the ballot

to provide funding for

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger already managed to get a similar 3 billion dollar measure passed.

Is state funding a researchers only hope?

Director of Bioethics Studies, Seagrid Freibir, is more than a little

bit skeptical.

Any thoughts on Elliot Spitzer's bond measure?

Well, I think it's a big mistake.

For one, any time there is government funding, it takes a long time to initiate the actual research.

He's suggesting that voters vote on approving this bond measure next November.

So, you know, we're talking about 10 months from now where it gets

voted on and then after that you have to worry about actually figuring out how to

get the money to get the interest on the money, to establish the agencies that are going to distribute the money.

And if it happens like what happened in California, which is actually the state that first issued bonds for stem cell research in 2004,

not a single penny has been distributed in grants yet,

because it's tied up in litigation, the money, the bonds themselves haven't been issued, and there's just all

sorts of administrative problems.

So the only research so far that has begun in California is on old research money or on actually loans from the private

...