Ever since Barack Obama was made the 44th president of the United States, stem cell researchers have been poised over their lab benches, waiting for the moment he would lift the ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research.

Their wait may nearly be over.

“We’re going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, told ‘Fox News Sunday’ at the weekend.

This is probably not a moment too soon. Stem cell research advocates have been making unhappy noises of late about how long it seemed to be taking the new administration to get round to lifting the ban, as the LA Times has pointed out:

Wary of a delay, one prominent advocacy group sent Obama a letter recently saying that he had pledged to revoke the Bush order. “We wanted him to know that we were still counting on the campaign commitment,” said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

Writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica blog, Jonathan Slack, director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota says:

Lifting the ban also will be welcome because it will eliminate the red tape that is required to separate the financial accounting of federally fundable and non-fundable work. This can be quite complex; for example, a shared piece of equipment may have been partially paid for with federal funds. Fine judgement may be required to determine whether, say, 50 percent funding represents a problem if the machine is only 30 percent used for federally non-permitted purposes.