The Justice Department announced it will appeal a temporary injunction on embryonic stem cell research, but that won’t stop some medical experiments from halting while scientists figure out what they can do through what funding mechanism.

The National Institutes of Health told anxious researchers that if they’ve already received money this year — $131 million in total — they may keep doing their stem cell work but that no new money can be given out.

That means 22 projects due to get yearly checks in September, another $54 million worth, “will be stopped in their tracks,” NIH Director Francis Collins said. Dozens more proposals for new research won’t get a hearing.

“This decision has just poured sand into the engine of discovery,” Collins said.

The appeal doesn’t look all that promising, either. Judge Royce Lamberth’s ruling would get appealed up to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, a notoriously conservative court. After that, the appeal on the injunction could go up to the Supreme Court, but that body has a conservative lean as well. And the question is more technical than ideological, although the ideologues could hide behind the technical explanation. Basically, Lamberth said that funding for any research that destroys human embryos violates the Dickey-Wicker amendment on such practices, and that the segregation of funds that allows through Presidential order for ESC research funding to go forward still fails that test. It does seem that the best remedy is a legislative one, and if supporters of this potentially life-saving research want to fix the problem, they’ll have to go that route. Such a statute passed Congress twice in the Bush years.