A 1996 Federal Budget Amendment Darkens the Future of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

SCIAM

Human embryonic stem cells can live on indefinitely when carefully cultured under just the right conditions. The legal and legislative environments for these cell lines, however, has gotten a lot less hospitable in recent weeks.

After a federal judge placed an injunction on federal funding for all human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in late August scientists and advocates faced rules that were far more stringent than those under the George W. Bush administration. A temporary lift of the injunction, issued September 9 by a federal appeals court, has done little to solidify the field's future.

The fate of many projects now hangs on language in a congressional budget amendment that was passed years before the first human embryonic stem cell was isolated.

The legislation in question, the 1996 Dickey–Wicker Amendment, prohibits federal funds from being used for any work that would harm or destroy a human embryo. Rather than being voted on annually, the amendment is attached to a slew of other National Institutes of Health (NIH) legislation and gets renewed as part of a batch.

Under Dickey–Wicker, President Bush allowed federal funding for research only on stem cell lines that had already been derived (but prevented the government from backing the further destruction of any embryos). And President Barack Obama pushed the amendment's limitations by asking the NIH in 2009 to allocate funds for still more lines of cells.

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