Conclusions: Towards the Global Politics of Stem Cell Research

Abstract

When it was announced on 20 November 2007 that the journals Cell and Science were going to publish two papers on iPS, they were immediately hailed as historic breakthroughs in human stem cell research. They appeared to benefit from the progress in hESC research without the need to deal with the multifold bioethical issues involved in hESC research (Gawrylewski, 2007). The groups of Shinya Yamanaka at the University of Kyoto, who is also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) at the University of California, San Francisco, and James Thomson in Wisconsin had used genes to programme human cells so that they had all the characteristics of hESCs — but without being derived from human embryos (Takahashi et al., 2007; Yu et al., 2007).