Embryonic stem cells, seen through a microscope
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Stem-cell scientists still reeling from a judge's ruling that their life's work violates federal law received little reassurance about their job security from the nation's largest funder of these studies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Describing stem-cell research as one of the more promising engines of scientific discovery, NIH director Francis Collins said the legal decision "poured sand into that engine of discovery."
Late on Tuesday, a day after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth filed his ruling that the NIH's use of taxpayer dollars to fund experiments on human embryonic stem cells violates a 1996 law that prohibits the government from supporting any research that harms or destroys human embryos, the Obama Administration announced that it plans to appeal the judge's preliminary injunction on all such government-funded studies currently under way in the U.S. Left unchallenged for the moment is the ban on pending studies -- and there are a lot of them. According to Collins, about 50 new grant applications that were awaiting review by NIH experts were pulled from the agency's evaluation queue and put aside. A planned September meeting of an NIH advisory council to consider an additional dozen grants worth $15-$20 million that have already passed a first-level review and would undergo a second evaluation was canceled, Collins said, because "the council is not even allowed to discuss them." Another 22 grants totaling $54 million are up for an annual review and refunding in September as well, he said, but with Lamberth's decision, "those projects would basically stop in their tracks."
The only good news came for those scientists who, through serendipity, already reupped their annual grant and received their portion of the $131 million that the NIH has issued to scientists this year. Those experiments, said Collins, could continue -- at least until they are due for renewal again next year. For the others in the stem-cell community, the ruling represents the worst possible scenario, with the federal government essentially walking away from an entire field of scientific study. "This is clearly sad news for all of us in the U.S. who work with embryonic stem cells," says Kevin Eggan, a principal investigator at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
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