Stem cell laws and policy in the United States
In 1973, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States. Five years later, the first successful human "in vitro" fertilization resulted in the birth of Louise Brown in England. These developments prompted the federal government to create regulations barring the use of federal funds for research that experimented on human embryos. In 1995, the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel advised the administration of President Bill Clinton to permit federal funding for research on embryos left over from "in vitro" fertility treatments and also recommended federal funding of research on embryos specifically created for experimentation. In response to the panel's recommendations, the Clinton administration, citing moral and ethical concerns, declined to fund research on embryos created solely for research purposes, but did agree to fund research on left-over embryos created by "in vitro" fertility treatments. At this point, the Congress intervened and passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment in 1995 (the final bill, which included the Dickey Amendment, was signed into law by Bill Clinton) which prohibited any federal funding for the Department of Health and Human Services be used for research that resulted in the destruction of an embryo regardless of the source of that embryo. In 1998, privately funded research led to the breakthrough discovery of human Embryonic stem cells (hESC).
Samuel H. Wood
In 2008, Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg, marking the first time anyone had done so with adult skin cells. The five cloned embryos were later destroyed, In January 2008, Wood and Andrew French, Stemagen's chief scientific officer in California, announced that they had successfully created the first five mature human embryos using DNA from adult skin cells, aiming to provide a less-controversial source of viable embryonic stem cells. Dr. Wood and a colleague donated skin cells and the DNA from those cells was transferred into human eggs. It is not clear if the embryos produced would have been capable of further development, but Dr. Wood stated that if that were possible, using the technology for reproductive cloning would be both unethical and illegal. The five cloned embryos, created in Stemagen Corporation lab in La Jolla, were later destroyed. Ethics concerns were subsequently raised.