The fate of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in the United States will be decided in the coming weeks, beginning with an oral hearing in court next Monday. For years, federal funding has supported all hESC research that does not involve the destruction of new human embryos. In other words, the government funds research for stem cell lines obtained from human embryos destroyed in the past, but not research that involves destroying new ones.

However, that may be about to change if the decision Chief Justice Royce Lamberth of the federal district court in Washington D.C. made on Aug. 23 stands. He decreed that all hESC research, including studies using cell lines harvested from embryos many years ago, should no longer receive federal funding because it was in violation of a ban implemented in 1996.

For now, it’s back to business as usual in the research community, thanks to a stay on the ruling that temporarily lifts the ban while details of the case are being examined. Still, the decision has taken a heavy toll by throwing many years of research into doubt.

Lamberth’s interpretation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment – the bill he claims mandates a ban of all hESC research – is both false and pernicious; it will halt progress and cause harm to UW-Madison, the state of Wisconsin, and the nation. To see how that is true, though, we need to first evaluate what the amendment says, and what its purpose is.

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment says: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero.”

This simply means that federally funded research should not involve actively destroying human embyros. This is how it has always been: research which uses preexisting stem cell lines obtained from embryos already harvested in the past are eligible for federal funding, but obtaining new stem cell lines by harvesting from new human embryos would render a particular research project ineligible. The amendment has been reinstated every year by Congress, and hESC research that meets those guidelines have been receiving federal funding – until Lamberth’s interpretation came along.

Congress has never denied that research on existing stem cell lines should be funded, and the amendment has never been interpreted to ban funding for stem cell research. However, Lamberth’s argument is that the amendment means that hESC research should not be federally funded under any circumstances. This suggests that Lamberth is ignoring the intent of Congress – the very institution that created the amendment – in making this decision that will have far-reaching ramifications on the progress of stem cell research and the promise of novel cures for incurable diseases. If federal funding for hESC research were to be cut, large amounts of federal money would have been wasted, ongoing research disrupted and hopes crushed.

Twelve years ago, the first hESC line was developed at our own campus, making headlines and promising a revolution in medicine. Embryonic can change into any kind of cell in the human body, potentially replacing any damaged cells, whether liver, heart or brain.

Since then, research involving hESC has greatly proliferated in UW-Madison, where 21 grants in 18 research labs are currently provided by the government. It has also had a great impact on the state of Wisconsin, which is home to 600 biotechnology companies, 11 stem cell companies and 34,000 jobs in the bioscience industry. All of these could be under threat thanks to Lamberth’s decision.

While new treatments using hESCs have been scarce, they are still our best hope for the treatment of incurable diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The alternative often proposed by adversaries of hESC research, adult stem cells, are not as reliable nor flexible as hESCs. While adult cells have produced a few treatments so far, in the long run their use will be limited; they are not a plausible alternative if the goal is to find revolutionary cures.

Moreover, embryos for hESC research are obtained from donated specimens in fertility treatments. Even if they were not used for research, they would be disposed of anyway; had the non-donated embryos been used for research instead of left to die in biological waste containers, countless lines of embryonic stems cells could have been created.

Protecting embryos from destruction is not a matter of science: it is a matter of ideology. Embryos cannot feel pain and do not have consciousness, but people with terminal diseases do. To put embryos first before real people is beyond absurd; it is an insult to the dignity of human life.

When Obama was elected, he promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” and to make “scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Unfortunately, Lamberth’s decision is a challenge to what Obama’s administration aims to achieve, and they must not tolerate this. For the sake of the people and the nation, the government needs to fix this debacle.

Albert Budhipramono ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in biology.