A narrow religious view on stem cells finds favor in court

Science, religion, law and politics continue to collide in the battle over the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued an order halting federal funding of medical research using even the derivatives of embryonic stem cells. The judge ruled that the 1996 Dickey-Wicker amendment, which prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars in work that destroys a human embryo, can be interpreted to cover research being done today that uses technology unavailable when the law was written.

Scientists now grow lines of stem cells culled from embryos. Culling embryonic stem cells does kill a days-old embryo, and that is funded with private money. But once the cells are culled, they can reproduce in lab dishes indefinitely. Government policies said using public money to work with the already created batches of cells was legal. Not so, says Judge Lamberth.

For eight years, the American people were told that President George W. Bush’s executive order was all that was holding the line against public funding of embryonic stem-cell research. When President Barack Obama came into office, he wrote a superseding executive order allowing the use of stem cells derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics. These embryos were either destined to be destroyed or to be stored forever in a frozen state.

It should be noted that we are talking about zygotes, an egg that has been fertilized in a Petri dish and has divided about six times. It is a microscopic group of cells that has not differentiated into brain cells or nerve cells or any anticipated human characteristic, which is what makes these unprogrammed cells important tools in developing therapies or treatments for scores of diseases.

The moral objection to the destruction of zygotes in medical research is a narrow religious argument based on a faith-holding that a divinely infused person is present from the moment of conception, whether that conception takes place in a woman’s body or a laboratory petri dish.

It is the same strain of religiosity that argues against any form of artificial birth control, against treating rape victims in ways that avoid a possible pregnancy and against abortion at any stage and for whatever reason, including cases of rape, incest or a pregnancy that endangers the life of a woman.

These are religious beliefs that religious leaders are free to espouse from the pulpits that the faithful are free to live by. They are the kinds of beliefs that theocratic governments can impose. But the United States was not conceived as a theocracy and no branch of the government — legislative, administrative or judicial — should function as one.

A noncompete clause

Which brings us back to Judge Lamberth. The judge was hearing a case brought by two doctors who do research with adult stem cells, James Sherley of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Theresa Deisher of AVM Biotechnology. They argue that the Obama administration guidelines will result in increased competition for limited federal funding and will injure their ability to compete successfully for National Institutes of Health stem-cell research money. They received strong backing from a number of socially conservative groups.

By any fair reading, Lamberth’s ruling represents judicial activism on a high plane. The judge gives a new interpretation of a law that has been on the books for more than a decade and was not read so expansively by the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton or Bush or by Congress. And he’s invoking the law to protect a claimed right by one group of researchers to pursue federal money on a tilted table, a table on which other researchers wouldn’t be allowed to compete. This ought to offend conservative sensibilities, but don’t count on it.

The Obama administration is already pursuing an appeal, as well it should. Congress, of course, could end the court battle by clarifying the issue legislatively, but don’t count on that, either. Not in the polarized political climate in Washington today. And not when even Republicans who have supported stem-cell research in the past will run the other way rather than risk alienating the cultural extremists in their party.