Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal of Lawsuit Over Financing of Stem-Cell Research

A federal appeals court has ruled that the federal government may continue to pay for research on embryonic stem cells, upholding a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit that challenged the financing of such research. The latest decision, issued on Friday by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, affirms a lower court’s ruling that was handed down in July 2011. The three-year-old lawsuit had asserted that the National Institutes of Health was violating a 1996 law prohibiting government spending on research that harms an embryo. But the appeals court ruled that the agency’s interpretation of the statute’s language is “reasonable” and therefore may stand.