News blog

US judge puts temporary block on human embryonic stem cell research

A US court has issued a temporary injunction against federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research as permitted by the Obama administration last year. The judge agreed with plaintiffs in a lawsuit contending that such research is illegal because it destroys embryos. (Reuters, AP, FoxNews)

The suit was brought against the Department of Health and Human Services by Christian groups last August, after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued guidelines in response to President Obama’s lifting the previous administration’s restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research. It charged that the new policy violates the Dickey–Wicker Amendment, a law that prohibits federal funding of research on human embryos. It was quickly dismissed because the plaintiffs were deemed to have no standing in the case.

In June, however, James Sherley, an adult stem cell researcher at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute, and Theresa Deisher, research and development director of the firm AVM Biotechnology in Seattle, Washington, appealed, and the case was granted standing on the grounds that human embryonic stem cell research would increase funding competition for scientists working on adult stem cells (see Nature’s editorial on the subject here).

In the court opinion released today, Judge Royce Lamberth noted that he believed the case was likely to succeed. “ESC research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed. To conduct ESC research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus, ESC research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo,” he writes [see full document here].

The NIH had no comment on the turn of events this afternoon; spokesperson Don Ralbovsky told Nature the agency was deferring comment to the Department of Justice.

Comments

Comments are closed.