Law Page
Our group composed what we felt would make a good set of laws to regulate stem cell research to be enacted in the arbitrarily picked year 2017.
Click here to view these laws.
In terms of the legality of stem cell research, there are currently no official restrictions, as it is a new scientific field. In fact, there are still no governing laws about the issue of cloning, which has been a topic of discussion for a number of years. As with any scientific advent, the legal system struggles to keep pace.
However, President Bush addressed the nation on August 9th, and gave his verbal approval of such research, after he mentioned both the positive and negative aspects of it. He also declared that the United States would aid in funding the existing 64 stem cell lines, which are referred to as germ lines. All other germ lines would have to be privately funded. President Bush is only funding these specific germ lines because these embryos would have been discarded anyway, if not used for scientific purposes. The government has allocated 250 million dollars to the science.
After the President's speech, he worked in coalition with the National Institute of Health to develop guidelines for proper stem cell research. Although these are merely guidelines, legislation is surely in the process of being written.
The NIH preliminary guidelines as to its proper methods include:
~The donors must give consent on behalf of the cells without any inducement.
~The embryo also must have been frozen and created for the purpose of fertility treatment, but was found to be in excess of clinical need.
~The donor will not receive any benefits from commercial development.
Even with such guidelines, legal issues arise, as investors and laboratories attempt to gain legal property over their already developed germ lines and techniques. Another product of Bush's address was the effect of copyrights in the science. Laboratories, such as University of Wisconsin based "WiCell," have been quick to copyright their techniques in isolating and working with stem cells. Unfortunately, this posed a hindrance to the progression of the science, and could be considered a monopoly. Therefore, the United States government stepped in, drafting a contract with WiCell to share their approved germ line with other researchers. The stipulation was that WiCell would still get the credit for all future discoveries. If any possible means for profit are found in stem cell research, WiCell has already contracted to market such products.
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