Court Rules for NIH in Stem Cell Research
- By BSTQ Staff
On July 27, Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the District of Columbia District Court, ruled that the U.S. government can continue funding embryonic stem-cell research. His ruling threw out a 2009 lawsuit by researchers Dr. James Sherley of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Theresa Deisher, PhD, of AVM Biotechnology that challenged President Obama’s 2009 order to expand funding for the research, for which he also called on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to come up with guidelines to implement his order.
In August 2010, Lamberth ruled that the NIH guidelines violated the DickeyWicker Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk or injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero.” But a month after Lamberth’s ruling, a three-judge appeals court panel lifted Lamberth’s suspension while the lawsuit moved forward, and in April the panel sent the case back to Lamberth. In dismissing the suit, Lamberth ruled that allowing federal funding for research using stem cells that were created using private funds is not a violation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. “This Court, following the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning and conclusions, must find that defendants reasonably interpreted the DickeyWicker Amendment to permit funding for human embryonic stem-cell research because such research is not ‘research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed,’” Lamberth stated in his opinion.