Korean stem-cell lab will bypass ethical issues
By CanWest News Service / Edmonton Journal,
CanWest News Service / Edmonton Journal
| 10. 19. 2005
An "offshore haven" for human embryonic stem-cell research is being created to sidestep legal, ethical and political barriers to such experiments in North America.
South Korean scientists, who are masters at creating stem cells from custom-built human embryos, are expected to announce today the creation of an international consortium that will do experiments outlawed in Canada, many European countries and several U.S. states.
The foundation, which is being likened to an offshore company that avoids tax laws, will offer scientists from around the world a chance to work with the controversial cells without actually creating and destroying embryos themselves, says a report in The New England Journal of Medicine.
For Canadian scientists, it could translate into opportunities to collaborate on experiments that are illegal in Canada and could land them five- to 10-year jail terms if done at home.
"As far I can tell, there is nothing to stop a Canadian researcher from going to Korea (to collaborate on the research) and then coming back home," says lawyer Timothy Caulfield, a biomedical specialist at the University of Alberta.
Whether Canadian...
Related Articles
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...
By Ari Schulman, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the...
By Megan Agnew, The Times | 09.15.2024
Faith Hartley always wanted two girls — a blonde and a redhead. “I thought, I’ll have one that looks like me,” says Hartley, 35, smoothing her golden hair in the Los Angeles valley home she shares with her husband, Neil...