Congress Must Save Stem Cell Research - Mort Kondracke
The 111th Congress has a lot to do before it gives way to the 112th next year, but one thing it certainly should do is make clear where it stands on embryonic stem cell research.
Even though Congress has funded the research to the tune of $546 million over the past nine years, a federal judge has stopped it cold, throwing a promising field of medical science into chaos.
Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth decreed last month, notwithstanding all those appropriations, that Congress was “unambiguous” when it passed legislation in 1996 banning “research in which human embryos are destroyed.”
Not only that, he imposed an immediate injunction on federally funded research and this week kept it in force despite pleas from researchers that his ruling would cause “tremendous, immediate, irreparable harm” to their work and to its “millions of potential beneficiaries.”