"A bad idea whose time has apparently come"
Posted by Jesse Reynolds June 23, 2009
Biopolitical Times
The governing board of New York state's stem cell research funding program approved payments for women to provide eggs for cloning-based stem cell research. This follows on the recommendations of the program's ethics board last month. On Twitter, Art Caplan called it "a bad idea whose time has apparently come." He elaborated a bit to The Scientist:
"I don't think it's a good idea," Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Scientist. It's "more ethically acceptable" to pay women to harvest eggs for in vitro fertilization programs because donor eggs have proven successful in assisted fertility treatments. With stem cell research, "the risk benefit ratio starts to slide," Caplan said. "It's a lot iffier a proposition and I think that makes a difference. In research you don't know what you're going to get, and the odds are that cloning for research is never going to work."In contrast, the Empire State Stem Cell Board defended its position in a statement [PDF] with emotional and misleading language:
Sources of recently-harvested oocytes are necessary for certain stem cell research pursuing medical advances to alleviate pain and suffering by people afflicted with debilitating and life-threatening diseases.
Researchers have been unsuccessfully trying to derive stem cell lines via cloning for almost a decade. A shortage of eggs is not the problem. Hwang Woo Suk used over 2200 and still failed. Meanwhile, iPS cells have generated disease specific lines without the use of eggs. Thus, characterizing eggs as "necessary" for the pursuit of medical advances is a stretch. Unfortunately, New York's program uses this misleading logic to break with an international consensus, putting women's health at risk in order to pursue a failed line of research.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: