Stem Cell Victory

Good news on the stem cell front, a US judge has finally ruled that federal funding for research with human embryonic stem cells (hESC) is legal.

Two scientists, of all people, had sued on the grounds that funding the research violated an earlier federal law prohibiting federal funding when a human embryo had been destroyed for research purposes, and a judge had frozen funding until the matter was resolved. But happily, the matter is now resolved in the right way.

I have written before on why embryos have no rights and why laws protecting them violate actual rights, so this is a good decision. And while recent advances have raised the possibility that stem cells can be derived from differentiated cells, we don’t know nearly enough about what makes stem cells tick properly to cut off the research we need to really understand what is going on.