Since 1996, Congress has annually renewed an obscure amendment to spending bills that prohibits the use of federal money for scientific "research in which... embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subject to risk of injury or death... " The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have all interpreted the so-called Dickey-Wicker Amendment to mean that government funds cannot support the creation of embryonic stem cell ("ESC") lines, a procedure that destroys the donor embryo, but that there is no statutory bar to funding scientists who use the resulting stem cell lines as tools in the search for cures for a raft of debilitating diseases and disabilities. Since the appearance of Dickey-Wicker, ESC lines have been created with mostly private money, and successive administrations have used presidential proclamations and Executive Orders to spar over whether federal dollars would be employed to turn these raw materials into treatments.
This consensus was upended spectacularly on Monday when a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., determined that Dickey-Wicker prevents the use of tax dollars to support researchers who work with embryonic stem cell lines, not just those who create them from embryos. The ruling, if its stands, will not only block the Obama administration's relaxation of Bush-era funding rules and throw the nation's stem cell research effort into disarray, it will even, ironically, render the trickle of money that the Bush administration allowed to support ESC research illegal.
In a lawsuit brought by two scientists who conduct research on adult stem cells -- which do not require embryos to produce - and claim a reduced chance of winning federal funding for their projects if they have to compete with the embryonic stem cell crowd, Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the prohibition on research in which embryos are destroyed extends also to research that uses materials for which embryos are destroyed. To defend this expansive reading of Dickey-Wicker, Lamberth starts with the proposition that "research" is by definition a "systematic investigation." True enough. Then, in a spectacular leap of logic, he concludes that any research that bears a relationship to research ineligible for federal funds is part of the same "project" and therefore also ineligible.
This interpretive logic proves far too much and admits to no reasonable boundaries of what constitutes a particular research endeavor. It would equate research on acorns with research on oak trees, research on milk with research on cows, and research on air with research on oxygen. Under Laberth's reasoning, the federal government should be precluded from funding research on induced pluripotent stem cells ("iPSCs") -- cells that act much like ESCs but are made by reprogramming adult stem cells and do not require embryos. Because iPSCs are programmed to act like ESCs, iPSC research cannot be done without using ESCs as comparison cells.
If Lamberth's ruling is wrong, how then should the contours of Dickey-Wicker be understood? The key is to remember the Dickey-Wicker is an appropriations rule that concerns only what type of projects may receive federal financial support, not what projects are legally permissible. The relevant question, therefore, is for what purpose the requested federal money would be used. If the money sought is to be used for a prohibited purpose -- i.e., destroying embryos -- the law will not permit funding. If the money will be used for any other purpose, the grant is legally permissible.
According to Judge Lamberth, "had Congress intended to limit the Dickey-Wicker [sic] to only those discrete acts that result in the destruction of an embryo... Congress could have written the statute that way." But this is, in fact, exactly the only reasonable way to interpret the amendment's limitation of the funding prohibition to research "in which" embryos are destroyed, when Congress might have barred funding of research "related to," "associated with" or "that builds upon" embryo destruction.
Congress has the power to withhold taxpayer funds from research that makes use of cells derived from embryos. But it has not done so.
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Russell Korobkin is a professor of law at UCLA and the author of Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology.
Stem cell research saves lives and both forms should be in full swing, as they are in Europe. It's more than clear that DRUG companies are behind the refusal to allow stem cells to continue; it's disadvantageous for stem cells to exist, for people would GET WELL.
1. Clinton didn't veto the Dickey amendment, prohibiting federal FUNDING of research that creates or destroys embryos.
2. Private money is unrestricted (except a few states).
3. At the current level of research private institutes like the Howard Hughes Institute could cover all legitimate research, but they don't want to deploy their capital on such a speculative question.
4. There is an honest division of opinion AMONG SCIENTISTS on the propriety of creating/destroying human embryos (for profit) that goes far beyond religious dogma (viz, The President's Council).
5. Bush didn't make anyone happy with his executive order permitting the use of "senile" cell lines.
6. Obama hardly expanded ESC research. His guidelines severely (I believe correctly) restrict the use of embryonic cell lines in human research.
7. As opposed to adult stem cells ESC research has not shown "proof of principle."
8. The hype surrounding the "promise" of ESC's is not justified by scientific data.
9. The risks of injecting millions of ESC's into research subjects include the degeneration of ESC's into malignancies, incorporation of mutated genetic material into reproductive tissues, and heretofor unrecognized consequences of creating human chimeras using pluripotent cells.
10. Other than actual clinical trials on human subjects all the questions regarding the utility of ESC's can be done using other species.
11. This is about using tax dollars for speculative research that venture capitalists won't touch.
Oh, maybe we shouldn't if a religious right-winger has a kid dying and extreme science could help them? Wonder why that is?
Please re-interpret the law so that my competition will be crushed.
Thanks bunches!
The amendment has been renewed by Congress every year and has been known to mean any experiment using destroyed embryos cannot get federal money. I am pro-choice, but I've eaten organic and used natural medicines/herbs for years: I can smell the stench of pharma all over this.
Embryonic stem cells have layers and layers of patents and royalties. Even without producing patient products, there have been lawsuits between patent holders. In the meantime, your own stem cells do repair and building working every single day. Dogs and horses have regained active lives after tendonitis, hip dysplasia, etc through injections of their own stem cells.
The FDA, in a blatant effort to protect pharma profits, has ruled that my own stem cells are drugs and thus must go through clinical trials before being used in my body. With this BS they have limited the great work that Regenerexx in Colorado is doing. But they can't stop the German clinic XCell ( http://www.xcell-center.com/ ) and others around the world.
Please Huffington Post, do an in-depth story on this: eventually someone will.
The lawsuit is absurd on its face. There is no "right" to any odds of obtaining federal research dollars. Thus, I don't even see how plaintiffs have standing to sue.
Moreover, the ONLY consistent position for opponents of hESC research is to ban the creation of more embryos than are used in a single IVF procedure. Otherwise, unused embryos are either thrown out immediately ("killing" an embryo) or stored for future use and, when not used, then discarded ("killing" an embryo). If such a law were enacted, IVF procedures would be more dangerous (more times a woman would have to be stimulated with high doses of hormones and the eggs retrieved), and it would be less successful since only a few eggs could be used to try to make an embryo, thereby reducing the number of successful pregnancies per IVF retrieval.
Of course, they don't have the intellectual honesty to make such a proposal.
This is yet another example of "poor loser" Americans. It is always somebody else's fault. You sue to overthrow elections because your side lost (e.g., the winner might not really have been born in America). You sue to overthrow affirmative action because you didn't get into the university you wanted (forget the fact that your grades and test scores weren't the greatest). You sue the government because your research is mediocre and you can't get funded through the competitive pathways.
Besides, who cares about judge Lamberth's opinion in Europe, Australia or Asia.