Aggregated News
It's a new, rather dicey form of life insurance. A company in California called StemLifeLine has announced that it will offer a service to generate stem cells from excess frozen embryos stored after in vitro fertilization (IVF). The company promises a huge potential payoff: the cells could one day be used to treat disease in the buyers or in their families. But the service is already garnering criticism from some scientists and ethicists who say that without current medical uses for those cells, there's no point in people paying for them.
"I think the company's website overly hypes what may be possible," says Lawrence Goldstein, director of the stem-cell research program at the University of California, San Diego. "They are almost guaranteeing that therapies are around the corner, and now is the time to start banking stem cells, but that strikes me as premature for the field."
The new service is meant to take advantage of a growing interest in the field of regenerative medicine. Stem cells from adult blood or umbilical-cord blood are already used to treat some diseases...