Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
commercial possibilities of stem cell and cloning technologies. At the
same time, much of the global excitement around these new
possibilities was also tempered by an extraordinary level of
community reaction to the potential consequences of what unfettered
applications of such groundbreaking discoveries could mean. The
years immediately following these discoveries saw human embryonic
stem cell research attain a high media profile amid all the political
and community debate about what should be done about both
cloning and stem cell research.
The debate over the ethics of using human embryos in research
had become so intense in some places that in 2001, then US President
George W. Bush used a prime-time broadcast to announce that
federal funding for research involving human embryos would be
banned (CNN, 2001). This move seemed to ensure that human
embryonic stem cell research was both irrevocably tied up with
reproductive cloning and seemed to be irretrievably mired in the
cultural politics of the US abortion wars. Subsequent administrations
have also dealt with the complexities created by this scenario, and
even now the use of human embryos in publicly funded research in
the US is engulfed by a legal and ethical quagmire that shows few
signs of being resolved any time soon.
The initial hype created by the discovery that stem cells could be
isolated from human embryos was driven by the potential of
embryonic stem cells to turn into any cell in the human body. This
opened up the possibility of being able to generate replacement
tissues effectively on demand for a range of injuries, illnesses and
incapacities. The so called 'holy grail' of stem cell science is the
prospect of being able to mass produce such a product and have it
widely available in an off-the-shelf format for the global market,
in much the same way as pharmaceuticals are made and sold around
the world. Little headway has been made in creating such stem cell
based products, although two human clinical trials are now
currently underway in the US utilizing human embryonic stem cell
derived products.
Nearly 15 years on from the first isolation of human embryonic
stem cells, a nuanced and highly sophisticated marketplace in stem
cell science has slowly inched its way forward. Around the world,
