The stem cell research policy established by President Obama last year made good sense. It propelled vital scientific progress yet seemed to respect the law forbidding use of federal funds to destroy stem cells. Following the prior Bush administration’s needlessly cramped policy, it prompted a blossoming of research programs across the country, restoring America’s position at the forefront of international research for therapies to conditions that trap people in ill health and predictable death.
That research came to a screeching halt Monday when Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, a 1987 Reagan appointee, ruled that the current policy – and perhaps even the stricter Bush policy – amounted to little more than a contrived ploy to evade the ban on federal funding for research that causes death of a human embryo.
His ruling came on a lawsuit brought by Nightlight Christian Adoptions and two stem cell scientists, Dr. James L. Sherley and Dr. Theresa Deisher, among others. The judge had previously dismissed the suit on the grounds that none of the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case. But after an appeals court reversed that view, leaving the two scientists as the sole plaintiffs, the judge found that the new federal policy violated the Dickey-Wicker Amendment that banned use of federal money for any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”
He included in his ruling an injunction on use of federal money for such research, immediately stopping related work in dozens of laboratories and universities involved in stem cell work funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The controlling Dickey-Wicker Amendment, passed annually by Congress, clearly stipulates that federal money cannot be used for research that leads to the destruction of human embryos. The Obama administration policy, in a gilded extension of the prior Bush administration’s policy, accepted that restriction. But where the Bush administration had allowed research just with a few lines of stem cells that existed when the law was established, the present administration also allowed research on embryos scheduled for disposal by fertility clinics and the owners who had signed consent forms for their disposal or for federal research.