As Nature went to press, US voters were going to the polls for the mid-term elections. Embryo research, stem cells and cloning have not been hot campaign topics. But when the victors take their seats in Congress, researchers can be sure that these issues won't stay off the agenda for long.

The Senate has so far failed to pass legislation on cloning to produce either babies or embryonic stem cells. But Senator Sam Brownback (Republican, Kansas), who opposes 'therapeutic cloning', as the latter practice is dubbed, is still committed to the issue. And if, as is feared, the renegade Italian scientist Severino Antinori soon claims that he has cloned a human, advocates of therapeutic cloning face a rough ride. Even if evidence for his claim is not forthcoming, it will not stop Brownback and his allies from seizing an opportunity to pass legislation to restrict a potentially important area of biomedical research.

Scientists have worked with advocates for patients to convince senators such as Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California) and Orrin Hatch (Republican, Utah) to fight attempts to outlaw therapeutic cloning. Now, however, they should return to the political fray with an expanded vision: to help draft legislation that regulates the broad sweep of embryo research, as well as some aspects of assisted reproduction, in both public and private sectors.

Currently, the private sector is left largely to its own devices. In vitro fertilization clinics, in particular, have been considered off-limits. The right of an individual to reproduce, while not actually enshrined in the US constitution, has generally been held to be inalienable.

But the sands may be shifting. The Bush administration's move to extend the remit of an advisory panel charged with protecting the interest of human subjects in clinical research to cover embryos and fetuses (see page 3) suggests that it is looking again at its hands-off attitude to the private sector — the panel can recommend changes to Food and Drug Administration policies, which affect private-sector researchers. And the President's Council on Bioethics is considering whether changes are needed to the regulatory framework for embryo research.

Individual states have also begun weighing in on the matter. In September, the California legislature passed a law affirming that researchers there can derive new embryonic stem-cell lines, including from cloned embryos, as long as they do not use federal money. Other states are talking about passing similar laws. And while this may seem to benefit researchers, states emboldened by passing such legislation might in future enact restrictive laws on other aspects of research.

At the federal level, meanwhile, the freedom to conduct embryo research lies at the whim of the current and future administrations. Federally funded scientists can now work with certain prescribed embryonic stem-cell lines, under a decree issue by President George W. Bush in August 2001. But that could be revoked at a stroke.

Fully debated federal legislation must be preferable to the current mish-mash. Britain's pioneering 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act has done a reasonable job of protecting the interests of both embryos and researchers. It's time to consider whether something similar might work in the United States.