Gloom and confusion in the stem-cell community

Late on Tuesday, a day after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth filed his ruling that the National Institutes of Health’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund experiments on human embryonic stem cells violates a 1996 law that prohibits the government from supporting any research that harms or destroys human embryos, the Obama Administration announced that it plans to appeal the judge’s preliminary injunction on all such government-funded studies currently under way in the United States. Left unchallenged for the moment is the ban on pending studies—and there are a lot of them. Time Magazine reports.