An appeals court ruled recently that the government can allot federal funds for grants to studies that will engage in the use of human embryonic stem cells.

The two-to-one ruling was made by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It grants permission to the government to make use of human embryonic stem cells to try to find new ways to treat a number of medical conditions, Reuters reported.

The ruling also overthrows a lower court decision made by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth which said the U.S. National Institutes of Health guidelines regarding such studies were violated because these studies involve the destruction of embryos, and puts other studies dealing only with adult stem cells at a disadvantage for funds, Reuters said.

Despite Lamberth’s ruling last August, federal funding of such research continued pending appeal. The White House said that if the studies were halted, millions of dollars could be lost, according to Reuters.

The appeals court decision said the U.S. law is “ambiguous” and “[does] not prohibit funding a research project in which an ESC [embryonic stem cell] will be used,” according to Reuters.

Francis Collins, NIH director said in a statement, “This is a momentous day — not only for science, but for the hopes of thousands of patients and their families who are relying on NIH-funded scientists to pursue life-saving discoveries and therapies that could come from stem cell research,” Reuters reported.

Sensitive subject

Research that uses human embryonic stem cells has been a sensitive subject for a long time, with supporters highlighting the potential medical benefits that might be yielded, and opponents saying the procedure is another version of abortion and may involve cloning of other human embryonic stem cells, The Christian Science Monitor said.

The stem cells used in such research comes from human embryos that are days old, at which stage they have the ability to produce any type of body cell. Scientists are hoping that with these embryos cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and spinal cord injuries can be addressed, Reuters reported.

Advocates say the embryos that will be used for the research are the excess that are harvested through in vitro fertilization and which would have been destroyed anyway, The Christian Science Monitor says.

Opponents take issue with the potential destruction of human embryos in the course of developing new cells for the purpose of research. Researchers say embryonic stem cells can be harvested from the placental cord blood as well, The Christian Science Monitor said.

There are no laws that ban destruction of embryos in the case of privately-funded research. However, private funding is not plentiful, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

The issue of human embryonic stem cell research has challenged U.S. leaders from the time of President Bill Clinton, along with Congress, especially regarding ethical and legal issues, The Christian Science Monitor said.

President Barack Obama expanded federal funding in 2009 shortly after he took office specifying that only embryos from fertility clinics, which would have been thrown away, could be used for such research, Reuters said.

Judges’ ruling

The majority ruling was penned by Judge Douglas Ginsburg with Judge Thomas Griffith. The ruling stated, “[The] fact is the statute is not worded precisely enough to resolve the present definitional contest conclusively for one side or another,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

As a result, the ruling determined it is “entirely reasonable” for the NIH to interpret the law as “permitting funding for research using cell lines derived without federal funding, even as it bars funding for the derivation of additional lines,” Reuters reported.

Opposing judge

In her dissenting opinion, Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson said the court majority was performing “linguistic jujitsu” and was parsing the 1996 law, in this way rendering it unclear, The Christian Science Monitor said.

Henderson said the intent of the statute was to disallow all research that could either result upon, or is dependent on destroying a human embryo. She wrote, “The majority opinion has taken a straightforward case of statutory construction and produced a result that would make Rube Goldberg tip his hat,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

The statute, called the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, forbids NIH to fund: “(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Researchers Dr. James Sherley (biological engineer, Boston Biomedical Research Institute), and Theresa Deisher (AVM Biotechnology, Washington), who filed the case, may appeal the decision and seek a full appeals court hearing, Reuters reported.

Other comments

Fr. Thomas Berg, a Catholic bioethicist and director of Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person, said funding embryonic stem cell research is “complicity in the destruction of individual, embryonic human persons,” according to Catholic News Agency.

Berg said, “You were once an embryo. That’s a simple matter of scientific and biological facts. The human embryo is already a human being. It is already a human person at an early stage of development. The arbitrary isolation of that embryonic stage has no logical footing to stand on,” Catholic News Agency reported.

Joyce Kilmer once said that only God can make a tree. However, a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently constructed (not created) an “artificial leaf.”

The scientists, led by Daniel Nocera, got their cue from the chemistry of the leaf, and came up with a silicon cell that has the ability to split water into its basic components of hydrogen and oxygen, in this producing energy, not unlike photosynthesis in the chloroplast of leaves, Daily Tech reported.

Nocera told Digital Trends, “The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for the homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station.”

In this way, homes in villages in Africa and India would—if the technology is perfected—have access to affordable energy, Digital Trends said.

As of now, there is an upside and a downside to the device. On the upside, Nocera said his “artificial leaf” is 10 times more efficient at photosynthesis than a leaf. On the downside, it only works for 45 hours, Digital Trends reported.

It does not have the ability to self-replicate, heal from damage, or generate from the soil on the ground, Daily Tech said. Ergo, the artificial leaf doth not a tree make.

Still, it has the potential to raise the efficiency of solar power, according to Daily Tech. In appearance, the “artificial leaf” looks like a playing card in shape and size, but it is thinner, Digital Trends said.

When placed in a gallon of water under the bright sunlight, theoretically it is expected to be strong enough to power a house in a tropical country for a day, Digital Trends reported.

The “artificial leaf” does this with the use of a nickel-cobalt catalyst that was invented by Nocera, which interacts with metal ions, according to Daily Tech. In this way the hydrogen and oxygen can be stored in a fuel cell.

Solar leaf

Nocera’s “artificial leaf” is an improvement on the “solar leaf” that was invented 10 years before by John Turner from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, Daily Tech said.

The “solar leaf” depended on expensive and rare metals. Similar designs through the years were either less efficient or too expensive, Daily Tech reported. Nocera’s “artificial leaf” by contrast is more efficient and made of components that are much cheaper.

The only problem now is, the fuel cells where the “artificial leaf” will store the excess hydrogen and oxygen for later use is expensive. However, if a similar breakthrough is reached in finding an alternative to the fuel cell, then the entire structure could be mass produced, Daily Tech said.

A film was produced recently by a Christian, who is also a bioethicist, which challenges the morality of in vitro fertilization.

“Eggsploitation,” produced by Jennifer Lahl, director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network in San Francisco, is used as an aid in Lahl’s many talks at academic and religious institutions to explain why Christians who oppose abortion and embryonic stem cell research should also oppose IVF, The Boston Globe said.

The film, which will be shown at Tufts University and Harvard Law School this week, describes the procedures required in egg donation such as the donor having to take hormones and undergo surgery to harvest eggs, according to The Boston Globe.

Women interviewed in the film (who were admittedly extreme cases) described experiencing torsion ovaries, advanced breast cancer, internal bleeding and strokes, among others, from donating their eggs, The Boston Globe reported.

Lahl said the same technology behind embryonic stem cell research is behind IVF. Both involve embryos created in a lab by fertilizing an egg extracted from a woman, and both involve the destruction of embryos, The Boston Globe said.

Stem cells destroy the embryos for research purposes. IVF often produces more embryos than a woman will implant, so the excess are either destroyed or frozen. Lahl says this is no different from abortion, according to The Boston Globe.

Lahl also says the process invades human dignity noting, “The minute the egg comes out of body, it is graded, the sperm is graded, then the embryo is graded.” This is for the purpose of determining which embryos have defects, The Boston Globe said.

A mother of three daughters in college, Lahl was surprised when they brought home copies of their school papers that contained advertisements that offered money to young women in exchange for donating their eggs. Lahl is pushing for legislation that would prohibit payment to donors of eggs, The Boston Globe reported.

Evangelical acceptance of IVF

Evangelicals are largely unaware of the process behind egg donation and IVF. The technology is largely viewed as a way for infertile couples to have babies. Lahl told The Boston Globe, “They want to believe that children are a gift and that any way we get children is a good thing.”

Nigel Cameron, founder of Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, is also an evangelical Christian. He said evangelicals are not as concerned about IVF because the issue of abortion only became prominent in the 80s, by which time IVF was already a fact of life, The Boston Globe said.

So far, it is only the Catholics who have continued to object to IVF. Evangelicals have accepted most forms of contraception and do not believe, as the Catholics do, that the primary purpose of sex is for procreation, The Boston Globe said.

IVF is so mainstream, in fact, that as of 2006 some three million babies were born with this technology; and this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine went to Robert Edwards for his work on IVF, according to The Boston Globe.

The Catholic Church issued recently a cautionary warning on the first synthetic cell, noting that correctly used, it could be a positive development—but only God can create life.

The Vatican issued the warning after an announcement from the United States that researchers had produced a living cell containing manmade DNA.

The scientist, genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter, said this opens a path for designing organisms that may work differently from how nature intended, according to The Herald, Scotland.

The Church warned scientists of the ethical responsibility of scientific progress and said that the manner in which the innovation is applied in the future will be crucial, according to the Associated Press.

“If …it is for the good of all, of the environment and man..we’ll keep the same judgment (that it is a great scientific discovery),” said Monsignor Rino Fisichella.

“If, on the other hand, the use of this discovery should turn against the dignity of and respect for human life, then our judgment would change,” the AP reported.

Fisichella, who heads Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, stressed there is no necessary clash between science and faith.  “But we think above all about the meaning that must be given to life,” Fisichella said.  “We need God, the origin of life,” the AP reported.

Venter’s synthetic cell is actually Mycoplasma mycoides, a type of living bacteria that is commonly associated with mastitis in goats, according to The Herald, Scotland.

Venter’s Mycoplasma mycoides are synthetic because it was made with synthetic chemicals, transplanted and activated into a cell with manmade genetic instructions.  Venter’s team is now considering creating algae that can capture carbon dioxide from the air and produce hydrocarbon fuels, according to SiliconIndia.

Naysayers however doubt that making Mycoplasma mycoides is tantamount to the creation of “artificial life.”

On the other hand, Julian Savulescu, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford, said “We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research, and protection from military or terrorist misuse and abuse,” according to SiliconIndia.

The Catholic Church teaching holds that human life is God’s gift, created through natural procreation between a man and woman.  The Vatican said the first synthetic cell “must have rules, like all the things that touch on the heart of life,” according to the AP.

U.S. President Barack Obama asked that the commission develop recommendations about any actions the government should take “to ensure that America reaps the benefits of this developing field of science while identifying appropriate ethical boundaries and minimizing identified risks,” SiliconIndia reported.

Meanwhile Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, said “Any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition must always be measured against the ethical dimension, which has at its heart the true dignity of every person.”