Because human embryo research is just in its infancy, there has been a rush to decide what guidelines are going to be instituted for governing cloning experiments. To assist the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in determining which cloning experiments to fund, a medical panel was set up to form a preliminary set of guidelines. Steven Muller, the head of the panel, set out with the help of several prominent biologists including, Brigid Hogan and embryology specialist Mark Hughes, to put together a set of guidelines that would satisfy the concerns of both the scientific and religious communities. The religious community vigorously opposes all human cloning procedures. The scientific community sympathizes with the religious communities concerns, but does not want to lose the enormous amount of information that may be gained by human embryo cloning.

 Muller's panel announced a set of guidelines that they hope would be acceptable to both communities. They recommended research be permitted on preexisting embryos. These embryos would be allowed to develop up to and including the fourteenth day. Researchers would also be allowed to produce new embryos only for what the NIH considers "compelling research." Researchers would also be permitted to remove some of the embryonic cells from embryos that are destined for in vitro fertilization at a later time. The panel did not come to a decision in several other areas of research funding. Research on fetal oocytes and research on embryos whose donator is unavailable to give consent were left undecided. This brings up a question as to whether or not a person who aborts a fetus still has parental rights pertaining to that fetus. Legally the aborted fetus is not a person and has no legal status. Society needs to decide whether or not the fetus has a moral status. The panel suggested that research might be permitted after the fourteenth day of development depending on the circumstances, but definitely not after the eighteenth day, when neural tube closure begins. The neural tube is the beginning of the nervous system, including the brain, in adult humans.

Thus the scientific community seems to be giving more moral consideration to an embryo then a majority of society gives to a more developed fetus. The experiments that the panel recommended be banned include impregnating human embryos in other animal species, impregnating cloned embryos into humans, the use of embryos for sex selection, or the transfer of one nucleus from one embryo to another. These are but a few of the procedures that the panel felt were inappropriate for federal funding. I want to be clear on this fact: the above limitations only apply to federally funded experiments. Currently there are no laws directly prohibiting any of the above procedures in private research settings. It should also be stated that all of the above procedures have or can be carried out with current technology.