Quick…what do you know about stem cells?
Off the cuff, people probably remember actors Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox making public appeals for widespread support of ‘stem cell research’, with the implicit message that if you don’t support it, you’re not compassionate.
But most media stories about stem cells fail to identify which ones they’re referring to, as if it’s all one category you either accept or reject. Which keeps the media and the public ignorant, overall, about the defining issues involved in what is both hopeful and horrible science. It depends on whether we’re talking embryonic stem cells, or adult or skin stem cells. One is never morally licit. Or successful, for that matter. Adult and skin stem cells have been both successful and moral.
The recent issue of BioEdge has an interesting item about how little the public really knows.
Wherever human embryonic stem cell research is debated, newspaper surveys purport to show that a majority support it. However, because most people know little about even the most elementary aspects of stem cell science, they are ill-equipped to form an considered opinion. What happens when they know more?
A British university professor conducted a focus group to find out. Interesting results…
BioEdge also has this piece on more stem cell problems.
Is it their novelty? Is it their potential profitability? Or is it a Wagnerian doom which hangs over stem cell research? Once again a reputable researcher has allegedly violated ethical standards, run experiments badly and faked documentation in order to publish in a highly ranked journal.
Now this one is over research done on adult stem cells, done badly and stirring controversy for the Medical University of Innsbruck. But look at who’s in the hot seat over this – not the researchers who published the flawed paper in the Lancet journal, Dr. Hannes Strasser and Georg Bartsch. It’s the rector of the university, who wants to “enforce high ethics standards for stem cell research.”
The furious university rector, Clemens Sorg, wants to discipline Strasser and Bartsch. However, the university council, dismayed over the “the danger of serious economic damage”, wants to dismiss Sorg instead. University academics are backing Sorg. Austria’s science academy is being sucked into the vortex as well, although it is waiting to see whether Sorg will be impeached.
Impeached, for applying ethics standards to scientific research. Because it might mean losing some money.
The profit in the biotech industry is one thing the public should know about stem cell research.
