Stem Cells, Bush Ruling

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S August 9, 2001, announcement that limited federal funding would be made available in the area of human embryonic stem cell research stands as one of the significant developments in stem cell research and public policy, as well as one of the most recent.

Previously, in the wake of the 1969 breakthrough in in vitro fertilization and the 1973 Roe v. Wade legal decision, federal regulations had denied federal funding to research involving experimentation on human embryos. In 1988, the Reagan administration further denied funds to research using aborted fetal tissue, which had been studied as a transplantable material for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, and diabetes. A 1993 executive order at the start of the Clinton administration lifted that ban, and legislation soon followed to adopt the guidelines proposed by a U.S. National Institutes of Health panel. In the Senate, supporters of fetal tissue transplant research included the staunchly pro—life Republicans Bob Dole (from [Page 528]Kansas) and Strom Thurmond (from South Carolina), demonstrating an early divide within the antiabortion camp between those opposing the scientific/medical use of prebirth human tissue and those permissive of it.

A 1995 piece of legislation—the Dickey Amendment, introduced as a rider by Representative Jay Dickey (R—Ariz.)—forbade federal funding for the creation of human embryos for research purposes, as well as for any research in which a human embryo is destroyed (or subjected to unreasonable risk of destruction) in the course of experimentation. Toward the end of the Clinton administration—and shortly after Dr. James Thomson's first successful creation of a human embryonic stem cell line in 1998 in a privately funded effort—the president's National Bioethics Advisory Commission recommended that federal funding be allowed to research on human embryonic stem cells left over from in vitro fertility treatments, as such embryos had not been created for research purposes and would be put to no other purpose. Before this recommendation could be acted on, the president left office, and all such matters were put on hold as the Bush administration settled in.