To a dissonant chorus of cheers and objections, the National Institutes of Health released draft guidelines yesterday for research by federally funded scientists on human embryonic stem cells.

The issue arouses passions because the cells offer a highly promising new approach to many diseases, yet they are obtained by destroying human embryos, even though they are still at a microscopic stage. The embryos have been created in fertility clinics and have been discarded because they are not required for implantation.

The draft guidelines pave the way for scientists to submit requests for government financing of embryonic stem cell research. But opponents of abortion say they will continue to press their view that stem cell research is illegal because of the so-called Dickey amendment, which forbids federal spending on any research in which a human embryo is destroyed.

The author of the amendment, Rep. Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, said he was distressed by the NIH's action because "it makes the government an accomplice in something that Congress has stated specifically it doesn't want to have anything to do with, the termination of an embryo."

Many scientists strongly support research on the cells, under appropriate supervision, a view recently expressed by the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. But the commission said that oversight of the research should be independent of the NIH, a recommendation the NIH has not followed.

Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, said that "we have to bear the responsibility that people comply with our guidelines," noting that it would take time to set up a separate oversight system. The guidelines propose creating a stem cell review group within the NIH.

In the view of some observers, the NIH has in effect sidestepped the issue at the heart of the opponents' objections, that of the ethics of destroying an embryo. Backed by a legal ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH has said its researchers may make use of the cells but may not derive them from embryos, a task that is legally performed by privately financed researchers. The department's brief held that the stem cells themselves are not an embryo nor capable of becoming one.

"The issue won't go away by saying 'We don't know where these stem cells come from,'" said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. "I don't think that will fly. It's time to engage in specific debate about the sacrifice of some embryos."

Caplan said he believed most people would support the use of discarded embryos in research but that taking a political strategy toward a fundamentally ethical question, as the NIH in his view had done, was "to push the hard moral question into the shadows."