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).
Embryoid body
ESCs are the subject of much public debate due to the ethical questions arising from the derivation from blastocyst-stage of development, necessitating the destruction of the embryo. Although much early EB research was conducted using ESCs derived from mouse sources, cell lines derived from human sources are necessary to fulfill the clinical promise of ESCs. While current U.S. regulations, initiated by the executive order of President Barack Obama in 2009 allow federal funding for hESC lines that are approved by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the derivation of new hESC lines using federal funding is prohibited by the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. However, due to the association of EB research with ESCs, the long term outcomes of EB research may be subject to regulation by local or federal policy changes. EBs however, are amenable to the use of alternative pluripotent cell sources, such as iPS cells, which holds promise for future applications in three-dimensional stem cell differentiation.