Stem cell research—why is it regarded as a threat?

The British House of Lords voted on January 22, 2001 to ease restrictions on the use of human embryonic stem cells. Researchers in the UK are now allowed to use early stage human embryos for therapeutic purposes, mainly to retrieve stem cells. This decision comes amidst a heated debate regarding the medical and economic potential of stem cell research as against its ethical pitfalls. The scientific, legal, ethical and philosophical arguments have been discussed extensively (Mieth, 2000; Colman and Burley, 2001). In this report I therefore propose to take it as established that stem cell technology has great promise for the treatment of a variety of diseases and, indeed, that stem cell therapy may hold exciting prospects for medical advances in the first decades of the 21st century.What I wish to discuss is why the prospect of stem cell therapy has been greeted, in quite widespread circles, not as an innovation to be welcomed but as a threat to be resisted. In part, this is the characteristic reaction of Luddites, who regard all technological innovation as threatening and look back nostalgically to a fictitious, golden, pre‐industrial past. There are, however, also serious arguments that have been made against stem cell research; and it is these that I would like to discuss.It is indisputable that most novel medical technologies are expensive. However, they usually get cheaper as the scale on which they are used increases. A good example is bone marrow transplantation, which initially was extremely expensive. A few decades later, bone marrow transplantation has become a routine procedure that is cheap enough to be used for the treatment of numerous diseases. The same will certainly happen with other therapeutics—be it β‐interferon to treat multiple sclerosis, protease inhibitors to block HIV or monoclonal antibodies to target cancer …