28 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
The Clinton administration adopted this course of action 
and drew up specific guidelines to enact it.* But the guide- 
lines, completed just before the end of the Clinton administra- 
tion, never had a chance to be put into practice, and no fund- 
ing was ever provided. Upon entering office in 2001, the Bush 
administration decided to take another look at the options 
regarding human embryonic stem cell research policy and 
therefore put the new regulations on hold, pending review. 
In conducting its review, the Bush administration stated 
that it sought a way to allow some potentially valuable re- 
search to proceed while upholding the spirit (and not just the 
letter) of the Dickey Amendment, a spirit which the President 
himself has advocated.^^ The expressed hope was that the 
government, while continuing to withhold taxpayer support or 
encouragement for the destruction of human embryos, might 
find a way to draw some moral good from stem cell lines that 
had already been produced through such destruction — given 
that this deed, even if immoral, could not now be undone. This 
is the ethical-legal logic of the present stem cell funding pol- 
icy: it seeks those benefits of embryonic stem cell research 
that might be attainable without encouraging or contributing 
to any future destruction of human embryos. 
n. THE PRESENT POLICY 
The current policy on federal government funding of human 
embryonic stem cell research, then, must be understood in 
terms of the constraints of the Dickey Amendment and in 
terms of the logic of the moral and political aims that underlie 
that amendment. 
At the time of the policy’s announcement, a number of em- 
bryonic stem cell lines had already been derived and were in 
various stages of growth and characterization. The embryos 
from which they were derived had therefore already been 
destroyed and could no longer develop further. As President 
These regulations, as published in the Federal Register, are provided in 
Appendix D. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
