Stem Cell Research Halted by Federal Judge

One of President Obama's first orders of business after taking office, and one of the things he's done with which I was undilutedly thrilled (despite my aversion to presidential fiat), was to issue an executive order lifting the Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research.

However, because we live in the United States of Jesus, the dildobrains at the conservative Christian Alliance Defense Fund, who partnered with organizations like Nightlight Christian Adoptions, a group promoting "snowflake babies"—the extraneous fertilized eggs from IVF procedures that are "adopted" so more white babies can be made and used in presidential photo-ops by mendacious shitheads—sued to halt Obama's order, and yesterday Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, a Reagan appointee, blocked the executive order, "saying it violated a ban on federal money being used to destroy embryos."

The ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at universities across the country, which had viewed the Obama administration's new policy and the grants provided under it as settled law. Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling's immediate impact on their work.

"I have had to tell everyone in my lab that when they feed their cells tomorrow morning, they better use media that has not been funded by the federal government," said Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children's Hospital Boston, referring to food given to cells. "This ruling means an immediate disruption of dozens of labs doing this work since the Obama administration made its order."

…Dr. Irving L. Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, said the ruling was "devastating to the hopes of researchers and patients who have been waiting so long for the promise of stem cell therapies." Dr. Weissman said he hoped that the judge's ruling would be overturned.

The surest way to make this ruling irrelevant would be for Congress to stop annually passing the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death," and instead write legislation prioritizing science that ultimately stands to save or improve millions of lives over prohibitions conceived in response to a narrow religious view our government isn't intended to sanction.

But that would, of course, require the Democratic Party to have a spine.

So, yeah. I guess I'm with Dr. Weissman, and I just have to hope that the judge's ruling will be overturned.

Hopey changey.