A Washington DC court this afternoon denied the government’s motion requesting that last month’s injunction against federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research be lifted.

“Defendants are incorrect about much of their “parade of horribles” that will supposedly result from this Court’s preliminary injunction,” writes Judge Royce Lamberth (right), who handed down the injunction on 23 August, in today’s court order. (Download a PDF of judge’s order here.)

“In this Court’s view, a stay would flout the will of Congress, as this Court understands what Congress has enacted in the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Congress remains perfectly free to amend or revise the statute. This Court is not free to do so.”

The government has said it will appeal if a stay is not granted.

Meanwhile, in documents filed on Friday, the plaintiffs said they plan to file for a so-called “summary motion” on 10 September, which they hope would prevent the case from being tried in a court room and would bring about a decision within two months.

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A stem cell research advocacy group consisting of nearly 100 universities, scientific societies, patient organizations and foundations has filed a court document explaining why Judge Royce Lamberth, who last month issued an injunction against federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, should stay his order.

In handing down the injunction on August 23, the judge argued that without it, the plaintiffs, adult stem cell researchers James Sherley and Theresa Deisher, would suffer “irreparable injury” in the form of competition for funding. On the other hand, he said, it “would not seriously harm [human embryonic stem cell] researchers because the injunction would simply preserve the status quo and would not interfere with their ability to obtain private funding for their research.”

In its 11-page document filed today (PDF here), the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR) details why that isn’t the case, arguing that the ruling will instead “effectuate a dramatic change and irreparably damage one of NIH’s most important research programs.” They note further that continuing the injunction will harm not just researchers and their institutions, but also “the millions of patients who could benefit from treatments developed using [human embryonic stem cell] research.”

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The US government this afternoon filed court documents requesting a reversal of last week’s temporary ban on human embryonic stem cell research.

“The court’s order causes irrevocable harm to the millions of extremely sick or injured people who stand to benefit from continuing research, as well as to the taxpayers who have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this research through public funding of projects which will now be forced to shut down,” said Tracy Schmaler, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, in a statement.

The documents filed by the government consist of two actions – an appeal of last week’s decision, which will be heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (right), as well as a request to stay the injunction, which will be heard by the same court which issued it last week.

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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.

<img alt=“ScientificReviewSMALL.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/ScientificReviewSMALL.jpg” width=“252” height=“142” align=right />A published scientific report used to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Lately, though, in many a journal, the boundaries of a paper have blurred, with bits of methods, data or other material finding their way into the amorphous category of “supplementary" material appended to the paper itself.

One journal, however, has decided to take a stand against the assumption that the more you include in a paper, the better. In a notice published in its August 11 issue, the Journal of Neuroscience announced that as of November 1, 2010, it won’t be accepting supplementary material for review, nor including it with papers it publishes. The most the journal will do, says the announcement, is allow researchers to include a URL and a brief description of such material posted elsewhere.

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A controversial program at the University of California, Berkeley, inviting incoming freshmen and transfer students to receive a personal analysis of three genetic variants in their DNA cannot proceed as planned, the state public health department told university officials yesterday.

At a late afternoon meeting yesterday, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) said that the genetic information that participating students would receive constitutes clinical testing, and therefore can’t be released to students outside of a clinical setting. Program organizers, however, argue that the testing is educational, not clinical.

“The CDPH was firm in its stance about our not being allowed to return test results to individual students and although we disagree, we will follow their guidance and modify our program accordingly,” Mark Shlissel, dean of biological sciences and one of the program’s organizers, wrote in an email to Nature today.

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Attention, scientists: got any friends who might want to make a donation to a broke biologist… or two or three? They can do so over at FundScience, a nonprofit organization which today is announcing three projects that you, your next-door neighbor, or anyone at all can help fund with the click of a mouse.

The idea behind FundScience is two-fold, says David Vitrant, the organization’s executive director: providing a novel system of support for young researchers with innovative ideas, and engaging the public more directly in science. Sure, people who want to support cancer research can make a donation to a foundation, but that money disappears into a black hole, and the donor remains completely disconnected from the science that money supports. “At some point it gets to researchers, but you have no idea who it is,” says Vitrant.

He and a partner, Mark Friedgan, created FundScience on the model of organizations like the microlending web site Kiva, where people can scroll through a list of small-scale endeavors, most based in the developing world, and contribute a chosen amount of money to those that strike their fancy.

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A computerized brain training program improves perception and memory in older adults, says a study published yesterday in PLoS ONE. The study was funded by California-based Posit Science, one of the biggies among brain training companies. The researchers say it’s the first demonstration that training preception improves a more general function – working memory.

Brain training computer games that claim to keep one’s memory and other cognitive faculties sharp even as we age have become something of a fad, but studies on whether or not such training works have shown mixed results. The biggest issue: while subjects invariably boost their performance on the specific tasks the games train, there’s been precious little evidence that these benefits carry over into improvements in memory or nimbleness of thought – faculties that folks rely on when they step away from the computer.

In the PLoS ONE study, conducted by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco as well as three employees of Posit Science, 15 people aged 60 to 89 underwent 10 hours of computer training over three to five weeks using Posit’s software. Essentially, subjects were asked to judge whether stripes on a computer screen expanded or contracted. The better a subject did, the harder the next item was.

The aim, says Gazzaley, was to train on a “really really low-level” task and see how it transfered.

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Lung tissue grown in culture functioned for six hours when transplanted into living rats, reports a study in Nature Medicine today.

Last month, researchers from Yale University performed the first ever transplant of bioengineered lung tissue into a living organism. In their experiment, the tissue performed its gas-exchange functions for two hours when transplanted into rats. (Science advance online publication, DOI: 10.1126/science.1189345).

The present study, led by Harald Ott at Harvard University Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, took a very similar tack. Like the Yale team and two other previous studies, Ott and his colleagues used the lungs’ own extracellular structure, carefully stripped of cells, as a matrix on which to grow their bioengineered lung tissue.

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Amy Bishop, the former University of Alabama biologist who gunned down three colleagues in a departmental staff meeting last February, has been charged with murder in the 1986 death of her brother.

Bishop, who was 21 at the time, fatally shot her 18-year-old brother with their father’s shot gun. The shooting was ruled accidental, but a full investigation was never conducted. The shooting was one of several violent incidents that emerged about Bishop’s past after the Alabama shooting. Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, who in 1986 was a district attorney in the county in which her brother’s death took place, said in February that the investigation may have been incomplete; investigators never received police reports revealing that Bishop had tried to use the shotgun to steal a car from a nearby car dealership. A grand jury convened in April indicted Bishop for first degree murder yesterday (The New York Times).

Her parents, however, maintain her innocence in her brother’s death and say there is no evidence that it was anything other than an accident. In a four-page statement quoted by The Boston Globe, they also expressed anger that some people involved in the 1986 investigation had appeared on NBC’s Dateline during the grand jury deliberations. “They might as well have displayed Amy in prison stripes behind them as they spoke, because they had in effect convicted her on national TV without a trial," they said in the statement.