Those Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

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For those of you interested in perusing the recently released National Academies Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research, here is a link to the text online. (The summary itself is twelve pages, so that should keep you busy for a while). I gather that various folks were working behind the scenes with the intent of ensuring that the end result would be a document that could be adopted by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) - no sense in duplicating work when reuse can speed things up. Unfortunately, it looks like the rules prohibit the very necessary and ethical practice of compensating human egg donors - and various bioethicists would like to see even more prohibition of compensation. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts: another fine example of what the medical establishment thinks of free choice, individual rights, personal responsibility and a free market.

If the folks managing CIRM want to see more rapid progress - as rapid as a government-managed program can be, that is - then they will refrain from adopting that part of these guidelines.