LIFE IS TOUGH for the stalwart pioneers on biotechnology’s cutting edge. “U.S. scientists studying human embryonic stem cells face unprecedented political, regulatory, and financial barriers,” Dr. Susan Okie, M.D. complained last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The “national debate over the ethics of such research” has so chilled the scientific atmosphere, she believes, that “the most promising method of making patient-specific and disease-specific stem cell lines”–meaning, human therapeutic cloning–“is not yet being performed in the United States.”
But, she reports, help is on the way. The World Stem Cell Foundation, the brainchild of Woo-Suk Hwang, the South Korean creator of the first human cloned embryos, plans to skirt legal restrictions and the public’s widespread moral disapproval of human cloning, which many scientists blame for hindering stem-cell science.
