Stem-cell scientists still reeling from a judge’s ruling that their life’s work violates federal law received little reassurance about their job security from the nation’s largest funder of these studies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Describing stem-cell research as one of the more promising engines of scientific discovery, NIH director Francis Collins said the legal decision ‘poured sand into that engine of discovery.’

Late on Tuesday, a day after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth filed his ruling that the NIH’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund experiments on human embryonic stem cells violates a 1996 law that prohibits the government from supporting any research that harms or destroys human embryos, the Obama Administration announced that it plans to appeal the judge’s preliminary injunction on all such government-funded studies currently under way in the U.S. Left unchallenged for the moment is the ban on pending studies – and there are a lot of them. According to Collins, about 50 new grant applications that were awaiting review by NIH experts were pulled from the agency’s evaluation queue and put aside. A planned September meeting of an NIH advisory council to consider an additional dozen grants worth $15-$20 million that have already passed […]