Cloning ban law likely not legal, trial judge says

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) - A Missouri trial judge said yesterday that a state constitutional amendment endorsing stem cell research likely creates problems for a law set up to award life science research grants.

At issue in the case before Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan is whether state grants for life sciences research can be spent on stem cell research. Critics of embryonic stem cell research have filed suit seeking to block $21 million from going toward the research grants.

The money is to flow from the Life Sciences Research Trust Fund to the Life Sciences Research Board and is distributed as research grants. The trust fund was created in 2003 to spend one-quarter of Missouri’s annual proceeds from a legal settlement between states and tobacco companies. The law that created the trust fund specifically bars use of the money for abortion services and human cloning.

The lawsuit contends those restrictions were trumped by a 2006 voter-approved amendment to the Missouri Constitution guaranteeing that any stem cell research legal under federal law is also legal in the state. That allows...