Refreshing Stem Cell Honesty, Part Two
Posted by Jesse Reynolds September 6, 2007
Biopolitical Times
We've previously addressed a dubious service offered by StemLifeLine, a new Bay Area company to bank leftover IVF embryos for future "presonalized" stem cell lines. Although the company continues to receive high-profile coverage, it's good to see commentators who are generally less skeptical than us take on this claim. Omnipresent bioethicist Arthur Caplan said, "It's a gimmick and many of the claims rest on hot air." The opinion of the director of UC San Diego's stem cell research program, Lawrence Goldstein, was that "the company's website overly hypes what may be possible." And on Friday, Stanford's Christopher Thomas Scott and Eric Chiao published an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, concluding, "There is simply no compelling scientific or medical reason for couples to pay to derive and store embryonic stem cells until therapies are ready for prime-time."