Stem Cell Research Ban Overturned By U.S. Appeals Court
WASHINGTON -- A divided federal appeals court has ruled that opponents of taxpayer-funded stem cell research are not likely to succeed in a lawsuit to stop it.
In a 2-1 decision Friday, the panel of the U.S. court of appeals in Washington overturned a judge's order that would have blocked taxpayer funding for stem cell research.
The panel reversed an opinion last August by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who said the research likely violates the law against federal funding of embryo destruction.
The 1996 law prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars in work that harms an embryo, so private money has been used to cull batches of the cells. Those batches can reproduce in lab dishes indefinitely, and the Obama administration issued rules permitting taxpayer dollars to be used in work on them.
"We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because 'nature' is the name for what we have to some extent conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. . . .The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psycho-analyse her.
". . .But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. . . It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. . . . f man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be."
It is good news. Maybe to late for my Dad but might help to cure/relieve alot of simple things that countries that don't have a ban have already fixed.
Arthritis is a big one.
