President Barack Obama’s administration will appeal a controversial ruling issued earlier this week that put a temporary stop to federal funding of research involving stem cells derived from human embryos, according to news reports.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia imposed a preliminary injunction on federal funding of the research, pending the final outcome of a lawsuit filed to stop the U.S. government from sponsoring embryonic stem cell research. President Barack Obama had sought to restore federal funding for the research after it was banned in 1996. Lamberth ruled that Obama’s stem cell funding policy violated the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which was aimed at stopping the destruction of human embryos.
Obama’s policy allowed the use of stem cell lines derived from frozen embryos from fertility treatments that were no longer needed and donated according to stringent ethical guidelines. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, James Sherley and Theresa Deisher, argued that the Obama policy violated the Dickey-Wicker rules.
Lamberth agreed, ruling that Sherley and Deisher are likely to prevail in the lawsuit and that the Dickey-Wicker rules clearly bans federal funding of research using ESC-derived lines, because “the language of the statute reflects the unambiguous intent of Congress to enact a broad prohibition of funding research in which a human embryo is destroyed,” according to court documents.
U.S. Justice Dept. said Aug. 24 that it will appeal Lamberth’s decision, according to news reports. The ruling means that experiments already under way can continue, but effectively stops any new research, forcing the suspension of $54 million in financing for 22 projects by the end of next month, according to the New York Times. Another 60 projects are under the gun, prompting the National Institutes of Health to warn researchers that their funding could evaporate.
“This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research, just at the time when we were really gaining momentum,” NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said. "This decision has just poured sand into that engine of discovery.”
The NIH spent $143 million last year funding more than 330 projects using ESCs and forecasts another $137 million during the fiscal year ending in September, according to the Times.
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) is mounting a push to revive a measure that would codify the Obama policy, which was passed twice by Congress only to hit vetoes by former President George Bush.
“This court opinion hit everybody by surprise,” DeGette told the newspaper. “It calls all of these policies of the last 10 years into question. I think what it really underscores is the extreme urgency for Congress to act to codify ethical embryonic stem cell research.”
That view is not shared by the Alliance Defense Fund, a group of Christian attorneys who helped with the lawsuit.
“The American people should not be forced to pay for experiments — prohibited by federal law — that destroy human life,” senior legal counsel Steven Aden told The Associated Press. “The court is simply enforcing an existing law passed by Congress that prevents Americans from paying another penny for needless research on human embryos.”
Lamberth’s ruling could reach even farther than initially thought, according to the Obama administration, because it would also bar research that was allowed under the Bush rules, according to the wire service. In the meantime, experiments relying on government cash could founder.
“These cells are notoriously finicky and you have to take care of them every day,” Dr. Jonathan Moreno, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told AP. “You can’t just lock up a lab and walk away for two weeks and come back and everything’s fine.”
For Dr. Sean Morrison, director of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology, that means a long delay in settling the case will put a stop to his research on a serious intestinal birth defect.
If it takes “months to settle the legal wrangling, then we will just end our work,” Morrison told the wire service.
