London

Spain's highest court is expected to rule this summer on a dispute between the national government in Madrid and the southern state of Andalusia over who should govern research on human embryonic stem cells.

The row echoes disagreements in the United States, where states such as California and New Jersey are trying to fund research that the federal government shuns.

The Spanish government passed a law in November that permits embryonic stem-cell research to be carried out under certain circumstances. Some researchers welcomed the law as relatively liberal for a predominantly Catholic country.

But Andalusia passed a still more liberal measure earlier in 2003. The province also backed ambitious plans to establish a stem-cell bank and research centre in Granada, with €5 million (US$6.2 million) of regional-government money.

Both laws permit the use of stem cells derived from frozen embryos surplus to reproductive requirements. But the national law prohibits the creation of human embryos for research and states that embryonic stem cells should be used only as a last resort.

Researchers are worried that, under the national law, central government will have to assess and approve each project. “This might take six months or two years,” says Francisco Martin, a stem-cell scientist at the Bioengineering Institute at Miguel Hernávndez University in Alicante.

“The national law was a reaction against the Andalusian law,” says physiologist José López-Barneo of the University Hospital in Seville. “It was designed to stop the regional law.”

Other researchers, however, say that the national law will clarify the situation countrywide, and is liberal enough to allow their work to proceed. They cite an agreement to collaborate on stem-cell research signed in January between the Spanish government and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a geneticist at the Salk Institute, says that the agreement may permit researchers to do embryonic stem-cell research in Spain that would not get public funding in the United States.