A pro-life group has sued the National Institutes of Health and the U. S. Department of Health and Human services for performing research on human embryos.
The Christian Medical Association (CMA), the Christian Legal Society and several other groups say they want "to compel enforcement of a long-standing statutory ban on federal funding of research involving the destruction of human embryos."
Last year, the Clinton administration utilized a loophole in the ban against using federal funds for research on human embryos, by allowing research on embryos that are obtained from private researchers, and that embryonic cells could not be created or destroyed using government money.
Dr. David Stevens, director of the CMA, said in a statement that CMA is pro-science and that members of the group advocate "ethical" stem cell research.
Some researchers are looking into using adult stem cells to study potential therapies, which groups like the CMA would rather see pursued.
"We think the NIH has really just ignored a lot of this literature," Stevens said in an interview.
Stem cells are the basis for every type of cell in the body, and many scientists say their powers of renewal are the only hope for people with certain debilitating diseases and injuries such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Many researchers think stem cells taken from embryos are the most powerful kind. But critics believe using them is unethical and immoral.
Stevens compared experiments using human embryonic cells to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments where infected patients were denied treatment so that doctors could study the disease's progression.
"If we continue to sacrifice human embryos, not only will many doctors refuse to participate in destructive stem cell research; many patients will refuse to utilize any therapeutic modalities developed," Stevens said.
"What happens if you get a good therapy breakthrough? A large segment of the patient and doctor population would be in a huge moral quandary," Stevens said.
Stevens said researchers have been harvesting embryonic stem cells in the hope of getting grant money from the NIH since the Clinton administration's announcement last year.
"The government is incentivizing scientists to go ahead and do that, and we decided we cannot continue to wait," he said.
Stevens sent a letter to Health and Human Services secretary Tommy Thompson, who the groups named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with Dr. Ruth Kirschstein, acting director of the National Institutes of Health.
Embryonic stem cell researchers see Thompson as a glimmer of hope in an administration that is mostly opposed to the practice. President Bush has promised to re-evaluate the Clinton administration's decision last year to allow federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Bush is scheduled to announce a decision on March 15.
Thompson is anti-abortion, but he has praised the University of Wisconsin biologist who isolated the first embryonic stem cells in 1998, and even threw a party to celebrate it.
On Tuesday, Thompson told a Senate committee he's troubled by the law in question, but didn't make it clear where he sides on the issue.
The field of embryonic stem cell research received a blow when a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday reported that a human experiment attempting to cure Parkinson's disease has failed.
In the experiment, holes were drilled in patients' skulls and cells from aborted fetuses were implanted in their brains.
The implanted stem cells did survive and grow into the right kind of brain cells, but in some of the patients, the cells produced too much of the nerve transmitter dopamine, causing severe involuntary jerking and twitching.
Researchers who performed the study called the results devastating.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
