Government funding for stem cell research blocked by US court

US government funding for research using embryonic stem cells has been thrown into disarray after a judge ruled that it violates laws prohibiting the destruction of human embryos.

The effect of the temporary injunction, by district court judge Royce Lamberth, bars federal funding for studies on stem cells derived from human embryos that are later discarded, which had been allowed by President Obama's executive order last year.

The judge ruled that the research violated the Dickey-Wicker amendment first passed by Congress in 1995, which outlawed the use of taxpayer funds to carry out any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed".

The New York Times reported that the ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at medical research universities across the US: "Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling's immediate impact on their work."

The injunction appears to set the scientific clock back to President Bush's executive order restricting federally-funded research to stem cells already in existence by August 2001. But some scientists fear that the scope of the latest ruling may even prohibit research on that basis, since the limited lines of stem cells allowed under the Bush regulations were also derived from human embryos.

The Bush-era policy was overturned by President Obama's executive order in 2009, allowing government funding for research on stem cells produced by privately-funded labs and derived from embryos that would otherwise have been disposed of after IVF treatment.

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