Recently, a U.S. District court has ordered a temporary halt to the expanded funding going into stem cell research.
President Barack Obama overturned an eight-year government block on federal funding for stem cell research that had been put into place by former president George W. Bush in his first year of office.
When making the ruling, the court leaned in favor of researchers who made the claim that in order to conduct human embryonic stem cell research, human embryos must be destroyed in the process.
“To conduct ESC (embryonic stem cell) research, ESC’s must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESC’s from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus ESC research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo, said Royce Lamberth, the ruling judge in the case.
Many of the researchers that had filed the claims were affiliated with Christian groups, and they were reported to have said that because ESC research involves destroying embryos, the new NIH guidelines were “contrary to law”.
After the ruling was given, judge Lamberth said that any lawsuits brought against the new guidelines could now be brought forward.