White House blasts stem cell bill: Senate to vote today on loosening Bush's research restrictions.

Byline: Katherine M. Skiba

Jul. 18--Washington -- Today, the Senate holds a long-awaited vote on stem cell research after a salvo from the White House, which condemned the legislation as "seriously flawed" and made plain that the president will veto it. The tough statement, issued Monday as the Senate opened two days of impassioned debate, foreshadowed a showdown in which President Bush is likely to pull out a veto pen for the first time since taking office. The measure he opposes would loosen his 5-year-old directive limiting federal funding on human embryonic stem cell research to those lines existing in August 2001. The developments are being closely followed in Wisconsin, because the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, in the words of officials there, is a "world leader in the field." Embryonic stem cells are obtained from frozen embryos left over in fertility clinics. Critics call the practice immoral, saying it destroys early human life. Scientists consider embryonic cells the building blocks of life because they can develop into almost every cell in the …