Another Korean Breakthrough

The President's decision to eliminate all progressive voices from his Bioethics Council is bracketed by two events in Korea:

  • First, researchers cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them.
  • Now researchers have developed a method for extracting stem cells from frozen embryos.

Park Se-pill, head of Seoul-based Maria Biotech Ltd, said in a statement he and his colleagues had, with the consent of those responsible, harvested seven stem cells from 20 frozen embryos, due to be discarded after being used at in-vitro fertilization facilities.

While our government actively works to shut down the entire field of regenerative medicine, huge strides are being made elsewhere in the world. Will we ever catch up? It depends on whether we ever get to enter the race.

Comments

Interestingly, I thought that this extraction from frozen embyros was already possible. Shows how easy it is to get ahead of the science given the nature of the debate. Too much information to juggle.

Posted by: Reason at March 2nd, 2004 12:08 PM

Reason:

This may have been a situation where it was widely accepted that it could be done, but just never had been done.

Phil:

We may have experienced some brain drain in this area, but I'm convinced that if our country ever gets behind this research (either public or private sector) we will quickly move to the cutting edge. We have the infrastructure and the talent to move quickly back into this.

Europe has a much larger problem.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/040119/brain/story.html

The reason Europe has a problem in most all fields of science is that they, like the U.S. in the case of stem cell research, have failed to support it.

It turns out that floating a welfare state is rather expensive.

Posted by: Stephen Gordon at March 2nd, 2004 9:59 PM
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