President George W. Bush gave his annual State of the Union address Monday, and his remarks on stem-cell research will likely reverberate in Wisconsin for the last year of his term.

Bush said he was in favor of funding the medical breakthrough by UW-Madison and Japanese researchers that reprogram skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells.

“This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life,” Bush said. “We must also ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves.”

He also said he wanted Congress to ban buying, selling, or cloning of “human life.”

Ed Fallone, president of the advocacy group Wisconsin Stem Cell Now, Inc., said the new research on skin cells should not be favored over other avenues of research involving embryonic stem cells.

Fallone said it is unrealistic to favor non-embryonic stem-cell research when it is unknown if it will be as effective as research involving embryos.

The emphasis on the skin-cell research, according to Fallone, could also hurt funding for experiments that are already ongoing involving embryonic cells.

“I hope Congress will ignore this unrealistic call to impose a moral litmus test on medical research,” Fallone said.

Ronald Kalil, a UW-Madison professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences who does stem-cell research, said it was important to remember reprogrammed skin cells do not have the same sets of genes as the embryonic cells.

This difference could mean they cannot replicate indefinitely like embryonic cells, Kalil said, but it is difficult to predict because few specifics are known on the new research.

The reprogrammed skin cells could solve the problem of a patient’s body rejecting donated tissue, according to Kalil, because the cells could come from a patient’s own body.

Kalil said Bush’s favoring for skin cell research could improve funding in Wisconsin. He also said it was unlikely embryonic-cell research funding would suffer until the new method is proven successful.

Andrew Cohn, governmental affairs director for the WiCell Research Institute at UW-Madison, said Bush’s comments were disappointing. He said the breakthrough in November with skin cells would not have been possible without embryonic stem-cell research.