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WASHINGTON - Reviving a debate over how society should treat the earliest stages of human life, the National Institutes of Health is close to authorizing a plan to fund medical research that relies on the destruction of human embryos.

The plan, in the works for more than a year, would clear the way for the first public funding of potentially ground-breaking research on embryo "stem cells," which scientists first isolated only 21 months ago.

These cells have the remarkable ability to grow into nearly every component of the body. Scientists hope to learn how to guide them to become new brain tissue for Parkinson's patients, new pancreas cells for diabetics, nerve cells for spinal-injury victims, and cures for many other diseases.

Under the institutes' draft rules, scientists could obtain the cells from embryos created by couples during fertility treatments but not used.

Lobbyists who follow the institutes' work say that the plan will be released by the end of this month, assuming it wins final approval from the Clinton administration, which so far has been supportive.

But once it is released, the plan will face a host of political and legal uncertainties, and it will raise difficult ethical issues that could reverberate through Congress and the presidential election.

"This issue pits two very important moral considerations against each other: the effort to cure disease and the effort to respect the sanctity of human life," said Ronald Green, an ethics professor at Dartmouth College. "It's going to be a political hot potato."

Abortion opponents say that the research is immoral because embryos are destroyed in the course of culling their stem cells, sacrificing one form of human life to benefit another. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee and an abortion foe, has said through surrogates that he opposes the research. If elected president, he could block the plan with an executive order.

Patient groups, who have an ally in Vice President Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, say that stem-cell research is ethical because it uses embryos donated by fertility patients, who would have destroyed them anyway. Couples commonly create more embryos than they need in trying to produce a child. The extras are usually frozen until the potential parents attempt another pregnancy or decide that the embryos are no longer needed and have them destroyed.

"Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?" actor Christopher Reeve, a victim of spinal-cord injury, asked during congressional testimony earlier this year.

The issue could land in Congress just before the fall elections. In the House, lawmakers led by Rep. Jay Dickey (R., Ark.) say that the plan violates a 1996 congressional ban on federal funding for research in which embryos are destroyed. The National Institutes of Health insists that its plan is legal, but Dickey has vowed to block the agency, either through legislation or in the courts.

"Dismembering a cell is like dismembering a person . . . pulling the legs and arms and body parts off," Dickey said in an interview. "We don't think our country is going to be better off having that sort of thing done with federal funds."

In the Senate, supporters of stem-cell research plan to press for passage of legislation that would give the agency explicit authority to proceed. Lobbyists on both sides of the issue say that the measure likely would win a majority, but not necessarily the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural maneuvers that could block the bill.