in Sherley vs Sebelius, Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted an injunction against federally funded embryonic stem cell (ESC) research on the grounds that the guidelines for ESC research "clearly violate" the Dickey–Wicker Amendment. In September 2010, he refused to lift the injunction pending the conclusion of the case and the issuance of his ruling and a likely appeal. In response, the Obama Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to lift the injunction via an order pending the appeal of Judge Lamberth's ruling, which it did on April 29, 2011. Judge Lamberth was thereby obliged to reverse his ruling, and grudgingly dismissed the case entirely on July 27, 2011. In the 2–1 opinion of April 29, 2011, the appeals panel said that the Dickey–Wicker Amendment was "ambiguous" and that the National Institutes of Health had "reasonably concluded" that although federal funds could not be used to directly destroy an embryo, the amendment does not prohibit funding a research project using embryonic stem cells. This is an important distinction under the law, because for federal funds to be used directly to support the destruction of embryos—as opposed to indirect use just in embryo stem cell research that avoids killing the embryo—is supposedly a violation of the Hyde Amendment, which has been ruled constitutional and which prohibits abortions using federal tax dollar funds (those questions will now have to be settled by the whole Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sitting en banc, or perhaps, ultimately, by the Supreme Court of the United States). History of US concerns about embryos Federal concern with human embryo research began over 25 years ago with the advent of assisted reproduction technologies, i.e. in vitro fertilization (IVF) or "test tube babies." Although the first report of laboratory studies of human fertilization appeared in Science in 1944, (the work was conducted in Brookline, Massachusetts), clinical IVF was successful first in Great Britain in 1978 for couples with infertility. IVF became standard of care in the United States in the early 1980s. As with all forms of clinical treatment, the medical community looked to basic science research to improve the safety and efficacy of IVF for mothers and babies. In 1979, an Ethics Advisory Board for the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines for research on early human embryos, but no action was taken. The Federal Policy for