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).
Consumer Watchdog v. Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
One possible reason for this apparent lack of concern within the scientific community is that WARF has eased its licensing fees and restrictions to such an extent that most don’t find the overall cost of hESC lines exorbitantly high compared to other cell lines. Also, work on human embryonic stem cell research has been mitigated to a certain extent due to uncertainty about future federal funding and ongoing ethical concerns of such research. Moreover, with the recent discovery of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, many scientists in the field have shifted towards iPS cells for precisely the reasons just stated. Finally, with all of the WARF patents due to expire in 2015, it seems unlikely that the resolution of this case, or any possible future litigation about the ‘913 patent in particular, will have a significant effect on hESC research.