In recent months there has been some legal wrangling over federal funding of stem cell research. A federal judge ruled that it was illegal for the government to fund stem cell research, based on earlier legislation that prohibits the use of federal funds to take apart an embryo, despite the fact that President Obama allowed the use of more cell lines for research. There was a temporary stay granted on the ban until the courts make a final ruling (which, at the time of this article’s publication, has not been made yet). The ban stopped financing all federally funded stem cell research, but the temporary stay has allowed labs to proceed in the meantime, although their future is uncertain.

All of this really started in 1996 with the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. This law prohibits the use of federal monies for “research in which a human embryo … [is] destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than allowed for research on fetuses in utero.” In January of 1999, then National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Harold Varmus ruled, backed up by Health and Human Services (HHS), that human embryonic stem cells (hESC) are not embryos. Therefore they were not subject to the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. George W. Bush ruled on August 9, 2001 that the nih could only fund research on cell lines that had been derived before that date. 78 cell lines were put in the NIH registry, but only 21 were viable enough for research. In the meantime some cell lines were derived with private funding.

In March of 2009, President Barack Obama issued an executive order to increase the hESCs available for federal funding. This law also called for the NIH to write guidelines for this research within four months. These new guidelines went into effect on July 7, 2009. All cell lines used must comply with informed consent requirements. Since then, another 74 ESC lines have been approved. The very next month, a lawsuit was filed against the NIH and HHS, saying that the law violated the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. The plaintiffs included an embryo adoption agency and two researchers working with adult (not embryonic) stem cells, James Sherley of Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Theresa Deisher of AVM Biotechnology. This lawsuit was originally dismissed, but the plaintiffs appealed.

On August 23, 2010, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the us District Court in Washington d.c. granted a preliminary ban of federal funding on all hESC research, even on the lines allowed under Bush’s ruling, until the case is determined. Consequently, the NIH had to stop all grant reviews and research on these cells. They stopped the funding of 50 grants in peer-review and 22 grants up for renewal, representing the withdrawal of a total of about $200 million. Then, on September 9 of this year, the Court of Appeals momentarily blocked Lamberth’s ruling, allowing federal funding and research to continue for the time being, no matter what the original source of funding.

On September 16, a panel of scientists, including NIH director Francis Collins and Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan, addressed the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, urging them to elucidate laws on federal funding of heESC research. They noted that federal funds are not used to originate the stem cells, only to maintain the cell line once it has been established, since the source is mostly embryos from fertility clinics destined to be discarded. When asked why research on only adult stem cells couldn’t be allowed, they noted that research on both kinds of cells is equally important. One of the scientists on the panel, Dr. George Daley of Harvard Medical School, told the committee, “I have been scrambling to come up with private funding so that I don’t have to lay anyone off.” On September 27, a federal appeals court began to hear arguments on the ban. They are still ongoing, so the fate of federally funded hESC research
in this country is yet to be determined.