The Clinton administration proposed to allow federal funds to be used for embryo research .
President Clinton has issued an administrative directive that no federal money be spent on human embryo research.
For supporters of embryo research the creation of hybrid embryos is a small but significant move forward.
We're opposed to destructive embryo research regardless of who funds it.
Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.
Until now, he has used accounting tricks to make sure federal money has not paid for the embryo research, which was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
Federal law currently prohibits taxpayer-funded human embryo research.
The ban was lifted for funding of fetal tissue research in 1993, when promising approaches were proposed for treatment of Parkinson's disease, but the ban on federal funding for human embryo research remains in effect.
"It doesn't have to be, you know, embryo stem-cell research or fetal or cloning, " Lott said.
CNN: Lott says he's opposed to federal funding of stem-cell research
Advocates of human embryo cloning for medical research claim the practice could lead to the discovery of treatments for illnesses currently deemed incurable.
The first scientists to clone a human embryo admitted today that there were ethical lapses in the way the research was carried out.
On Thursday a team of researchers at Newcastle University in the UK, which hopes to join South Korea in the forefront of stem cell research, also said they had successfully cloned an human embryo.
Earlier this week a team in the U.S. led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, announced they had created the first cloned monkey embryo and extracted stem cells from it.
However, when stem cells are removed, the embryo is destroyed -- which has made this one of the most controversial medical research fields in the past decade.
Whatever the benefits, there's no getting away from the fact that human embryonic material has become a research tool for the pharmaceutical industry - that the moral status of the embryo has been lowered for the sake of medical advance, profits, and extending the lives of an increasingly elderly rich western population.
BBC: Embryonic stem cells can be turned into any kind of cell
Embryonic stems research is inherently controversial because in order to use the stem cells for science, the embryo, which is a collection of cells that could develop into a fully formed human, is destroyed, even though embryos in these procedures are left over from in vitro fertilization.
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