Research on Embryonic Stem Cells Threatened

The lawsuit challenging the legality of the Guidelines of U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research on Human Embryonic Stem Cell (NIH Guidelines) that implemented President Obama’s March 2009 Executive Order is slowly making its way through the courts.

The lawsuit argues that the NIH Guidelines violate a provision of the annual Appropriations bills for the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health & Human Services, and Education. The provision, known as the Dickey-Wicker provision, prohibits the use of federal funds to create human embryos for research purposes or for research in which embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk.

With an unclear future before the courts, action by Congress is the one clear path to ensure the continuation of federally funded human embryonic stem cell research. Given uncertain election outcomes in November, Congress needs to pass a bill now to fix Dickey-Wicker and allow research to continue.

This lawsuit also directly challenges the peer review process and scientific decision-making and scientific freedom, since it could establish a precedent for lawsuits to halt the funding of peer reviewed research proposals.

Even if you do not work on stem cells, the implications of this lawsuit should concern you. A reinvigorated Dickey-Wicker provision, reinterpreted by the current lawsuit, could directly affect the fields of embryology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and clinical IVF research.

If Congress does not act before the end of 2010 and the elections in November do not favorably support the American biological research enterprise, it could be years before federal funding would be again available for critical portions of NIH funded life science research in America. You need to take action now.

To take action, simply visit this site: http://capwiz.com/jscpp/home/. Type your zip code in the box to your right. You will be automatically forwarded to a sample letter. You can edit the letter and send it to your elected officials right from this site.

We encourage you to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues.