A federal judge issued an injunction halting President Barack Obama’s expansion on stem cell research funding Aug. 23, impacting how research is performed at the University of Wisconsin as well as facilities across the nation.
In his ruling, Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, referred to a rider that has been included in every appropriations bill since 1996 that prohibits research where human embryos are knowingly destroyed.
Lamberth ruled stem cell removal performed in research projects that are federally funded by the National Institutes of Health at facilities such as UW destroys human embryos and is forbidden by the rider.
An injunction against federal stem cell research funding was thus “in the public interest,” Lamberth decided.
“It is not certain whether embryonic stem cell research will result in new and successful treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” Lamberth said in his ruling, going on to say that the harm against embryos was therefore more certain than the harm caused by halting disease research using embryonic stem cells.
The decision impacts multiple federally funded research projects currently in progress at UW involving embryonic stem cells, including 21 grants going to 18 different research labs in the range of $4 to 5 million annually, said Tim Kamp, professor of medicine at the UW Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center, said.
“I’d say it’s fair to say many researchers on campus are concerned about what this means for their ongoing research projects, because many of these projects are months if not years in the making and they’re not done,” Kamp said. “You’d like to get to a point where you can make conclusions and publish results, and to be stopped mid-step is disruptive and disappointing.”
UW labs will continue research using embryonic stem cells that are receiving ongoing federal funding, but these grants will most likely not be renewed and new UW grant applications having to do with embryonic stem cell research will not be considered at this time, Kamp said.
The unexpected reversal was one in a series of one-eighty policy turns in the last 10 years over stem cell research funding.
In 2001, President George W. Bush issued a policy statement prohibiting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research programs from that point forward.
Obama issued an executive order in 2009 reversing Bush’s restrictions and expanding funding for stem cell research, saying his administration would make “scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”
The ruling came only months after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation lost its rights to a patent on embryonic stem cell research in May. Once the patent was awarded in 2006, any research facility performing experiments with stem cells had been required to pay WARF a royalty.
Adhering to the new ruling at UW will also be complicated, because if federal funding paid for certain aspects of a facility, such as the lights, it is uncertain if embryonic stem cell research may even be performed within the building anymore.
“Now we’re thinking that we might be back to where we started,” Kamp said.
