Stem cell research is on again. Wait, no, it’s off again. Oh, who can keep track with all these back-and-forth court decisions? Wouldn’t it be nice just to have some stable stem cell funding in the United States? Fortunately, there already is a degree of constancy in many states around the country that had previously established their own stem cell agencies. And as the fallout from the US district court judge’s decision to temporarily halt all federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research drags into its third week, many of these states are feeling vindicated by their ability to keep the controversial research going without endless reversals and legal challenges.

“This is not going to go away,” Dan Gincel, director of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund, told Nature Medicine. “That’s why it’s so important to continue funding cutting edge research and to let the scientific peer review committee decide what projects should be funded, and not judges or lawmakers.”

After former President George W. Bush restricted taxpayer-backed funding for human embryonic stem cell research to just a couple dozen cell lines, a number of individual states — including California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin and Maryland — created government agencies to support stem cell work done within their state borders.

Those organizations were seen as life supports for the field throughout the Bush-era. But after President Barack Obama issued an executive order last year to expand stem cell funding countrywide, many critics argued that these state agencies were redundant at best and obsolete at worst. But the turmoil that the field has faced since the 23 August halt to federal funding — which a Washington, DC judge upheld earlier this week only to be temporarily overturned by a federal appeals court yesterday — should silence those critics.

Forbes magazine called the injunction “great for California,” because it will “set California further apart as a mecca for scientists investigating stem cells.” California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) officials themselves couldn’t help patting themselves on the back either. The federal injunction “points to the importance of CIRM’s California model of sustained funding in this field,” reads a CIRM press release. The $3 billion stem cell agency is funded through guaranteed bond sales, which makes the agency effectively immune to the ethical and political whims of lawmakers.

Private philanthropies dedicated to stem cell biology are also reveling in their ability to keep the research going without threats to their funding. “The whole problem with what’s going on at the federal level is it’s a nail biter and you don’t want a thriller — you want it in your movies and television, but not in your medical research funding,” Susan Solomon, chief executive of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, told Nature Medicine.

But even while states and private groups with their own funding are uttering a giant “I told you so,” no one seems to be happy with the injunction, which, at the end of the day, diminishes the total amount available for stem cell research in any state, even the Golden one. In a small survey conducted late last month by CIRM officials, 22% of CIRM-funded respondents said they also had US National Institutes of Health funding for embryonic stem cell research, and 95% of grantees said the injunction would impact their overall research strategies.