A federal appeals court has refused to order the Obama administration to stop funding for embryonic stem cell research conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the pursuit of cures for fatal diseases.
In upholding the ruling of a lower court judge made earlier, and which threw the lawsuit out first, Chief Judge David B. Sentelle said, “Dickey-Wicker permits federal funding of research projects that utilize already-derived ESCs – which are not themselves embryos – because no `human embryo or embryos are destroyed’ in such projects. Therefore, unless they have established some `extraordinary circumstance,’ the law of the case is established and we will not revisit the issue.”
The lawsuit was filed [in both courts] based on complaints that the National Institutes of Health was violating the Dickey-Wicker law [passed in 1996] and which prohibits taxpayer funding for work that harms an embryo.
Apart from the complaint that this research is using destroyed embryos, opponents also voiced their fears that success in this type of research will encourage the destruction of new embryos. In defense of the method used by the NIH, it was revealed that the embryos used for stem cell research were actually extra embryos that fertility clinics would have discarded anyways.
After the unanimous ruling was made by the court, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health said that the NIH will continue to fund stem cell research which looks promising for the future in the cure of diseases that are untreatable.
While George W. Bush allowed stem cell research, he limited taxpayers funding to the use of embryos that were already in existence where the life and death was already made. President Obama changed all that by including embryos that are to be destroyed or already are.