But since some members of Congress and millions of anti - abortion / pro-life radicals believe that embryo research per se should be illegal, you'd better be pretty careful about which eggs you break if you want to
do research on human embryos.
But he thinks that US scientists will inevitably take on such research, although federal funding
of research on human embryos and germline modification is prohibited.
This past September, when Niakan applied to the United Kingdom's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) for a renewal of her license to
conduct research on human embryos, she proposed to extend her work to include CRISPR editing.
Opponents
of research on human embryos might contend that reprogramming happened because of the federal restrictions on embryonic research, but Thomson believes the stigma on the field made researchers wary and delayed the discovery of reprogramming by several years.
Federally
funded research on human embryos, although sanctioned by a congressionally mandated national bioethics commission in 1975, has faced unrelenting opposition from right - to - life groups.
And because the federal government is not permitted to fund
any research on human embryos, work on in vitro fertilisation has already moved to private laboratories.
Some people have moral objections to doing
any research on human embryos because they consider a human embryo to have the moral standing of a person.