A lawsuit that had threatened to end the Obama administration's funding of embryonic stem cell research was dismissed Wednesday, allowing the U.S. to continue supporting a search for cures to deadly diseases over protests that the work relies on destroyed human embryos.

The lawsuit claimed that research funded by the National Institutes of Health violated the 1996 Dickey-Wicker law that prohibits taxpayer financing for work that harms an embryo. But the administration policy allows research on embryos that were culled long ago through private funding.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, chief of the federal court in Washington, last year said the lawsuit was likely to succeed and ordered a stop to the research while the case continued. But under swift protest from the Obama administration, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here quickly overturned Lamberth's injunction and said the case was likely to fail.

Lamberth said in his opinion Wednesday that he is bound by the higher court's analysis and ruled in favor of the administration's motion to dismiss the case.

Opponents of taxpayer-funded stem cell research lost a key round in a federal appeals court Friday.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. court of appeals in Washington overturned a judge's order that would have blocked taxpayer funding for stem cell research. The judges ruled that opponents of taxpayer-funded stem cell research are not likely to succeed in their lawsuit to stop it.

The panel reversed an opinion issued last August by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who said the research likely violates the law against federal funding of embryo destruction.

"We're thrilled with this decision and look forward to allowing federally funded scientists to continue with their work without political constraints," said Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Researchers hope one day to use stem cells in ways that cure spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's disease and other ailments. Opponents say the research is a form of abortion because human embryos must be destroyed to obtain the stem cells.

The 1996 law prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars in work that harms an embryo, so private money has been used to cull batches of the cells. Those batches can reproduce in lab dishes indefinitely, and the Obama administration issued rules permitting taxpayer dollars to be used in work on them.

The Michigan appeals court says the state cannot sue drug maker Merck to try to recover millions of dollars spent on Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004.

The court said Friday that Merck is protected by a unique Michigan law that grants immunity to companies if a drug has been approved by federal regulators.

The state attorney general's office is trying to recover money spent on behalf of Medicaid recipients who used Vioxx, an arthritis drug that was pulled from the market because of links to heart attack, stroke and death.

Judges Henry William Saad and David Sawyer were in the majority in the 2-1 decision. Judge E. Thomas Fitzgerald disagreed, saying it's not a product-liability case but an attempt to get a refund.

The state of Georgia has asked a federal appeals court to overturn an order threatening the water supply of roughly 3 million people in metro Atlanta.

Attorney Seth Paul Waxman said during oral arguments Wednesday that Congress contemplated water supply as one reason for building a dam that eventually created Lake Lanier north of Atlanta.

Waxman asked the court to overturn a 2009 ruling by Judge Paul Magnuson that found Atlanta had little legal right to take drinking water from Lanier. Magnuson's order would severely restrict that water flow starting in July 2012 unless Georgia, Alabama and Florida reach an agreement.

Alabama and Florida have said Georgia is using too much water upstream, which harms residents, businesses and fisheries downstream.

An experimental Merck drug safely boosted good cholesterol to record highs while dropping bad cholesterol to unprecedented lows in a study that stunned researchers and renewed hopes for an entirely new way of lowering heart risks.

"We are the most excited we have been in decades" about a novel drug, said the study's leader, Dr. Christopher Cannon, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "This could really be the next big thing."

The drug, anacetrapib, won't be on the market anytime soon. It needs more testing to see if its dramatic effects on cholesterol will translate into fewer heart attacks, strokes and deaths. Merck & Co. announced a 30,000-patient study to answer that question and it will take several years.

But the sheer magnitude of its effects so far caused big excitement at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago, where results were presented on Wednesday.

"The data look spectacular, beyond what anybody would have expected," said Dr. Robert Eckel, a University of Colorado cardiologist and past president of the heart association. "It's like a rocket to Jupiter versus one to the moon. I can think of many of my patients who could use the drug right now."

The Obama administration pleaded with an appeals court Monday to overturn a judge's order halting federal funding of stem cell research, arguing the ban would irreparably harm scientific progress toward potentially lifesaving medical treatment.

A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is considering whether to throw out a lower court judge's ban on President Barack Obama's rules for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington temporarily blocked Obama's rules a month ago because he said it's likely they violate the law on federal funding of embryo destruction. He's presiding in a lawsuit challenging those rules, filed by the nonprofit group Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which helps with the adoption of human embryos that are being stored in fertilization clinics.

The appeals court stayed Lamberth's order and allowed the research to continue while it takes up the case. It gave both sides in the dispute 15 minutes each to present its arguments over the injunction, but in an indication of the high stakes in the case ended up questioning the attorneys for more than an hour.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Beth Brinkmann told the appellate judges that Lamberth's injunction would stop funding to 24 research projects at the National Institutes of Health that have already received $64 million in taxpayer investment.

Judge Thomas Griffith questioned whether the work would really be irreparably harmed or just delayed if the government ultimately can win the ongoing case.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court held that federal funding for embryonic stem cell research could continue.

The ruling comes nearly two weeks after Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth blocked President Obama's 2009 executive order expanding stem cell research, citing a 1998 statute banning the use of federal funding for the destruction of embryos. Following that August injunction, scientists scrambled to asses whether they could keep research projects going without the expected government funds. This week's ruling by the United States Court of Appeals would save "research mice from being euthanized, cells in petri dishes from starving and scores of scientists from a suspension of paychecks." The New York Times' Gardiner Harris reports:

Among the projects whose financing was threatened by Judge Lamberth's order was one overseen by Dr. Ira J. Fox, a professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, who has used embryonic stem cells to successfully transplant new liver cells into animals.

Another threatened project was one by Dr. Xuejun Parsons of the University of California, Riverside, who hopes to use embryonic stem cells to create nerve cells that could replace those damaged by Parkinson's disease.

The temporary suspension of the ban will allow the National Institute of Health to provide $78 million to 44 scientists awaiting previously approved funds while the agency evaluates new applications from scientists seeking federal funding for stem cell research. The agency is likely to receive a glut of applications during this temporary window as research groups across the country look to capitalize on the sudden availability of funds.ks." The New York Times' Gardiner Harris reports: