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stem cells (1998)----------------------------"Starry Night," by Vincent van Gogh (1889)
embryonic stem cell colonies from the lab of developmental biologist James Thompson
Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Used with permission © University of Wisconsin Board of Regents
Today, November 20, 2005,
Washington Post Staff Writer Rick Weiss published an article entitled
"Donor Issue Slows Stem Cell Progress--S. Korea Crisis May Affect U.S. Debate," in which he highlights a central, but often undercovered, aspect of the embryonic stem cell creation process:
"With current techniques, it takes dozens of eggs to make a single cloned human embryo, which is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells. That means that if the field of therapeutic cloning is to advance -- a field involving the creation of cloned embryos as sources of stem cells that would be genetically matched to particular patients -- a significant number of eggs will be needed both to fuel the initial research and eventually to satisfy the demands of patients."
This
Washington Post article reports on many of the same issues covered recently (last week) in these two articles published on the
Etopia Media News Network web site:
"Oocytes hit the fan as Schatten ends cooperation with Hwang over alleged unethical "egg recruitment" for cloning research" (November 15, 2005)
"Proposition 71 stem cell quagmire deepens as 'egg recruitment' and 'cellular vampirism' issues receive heightened scrutiny" (November 17, 2005)
The publication of this article in the
Washington Post, one of the nation's premier "newspapers of record," clearly indicates the new prominence into which the issue of "egg recruitment" for embryonic stem cell research and, to a lesser extent, for use in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, has now fallen.
Etopia Media News Network has been covering this issue since before the November 2, 2004, election in California which passed Proposition 71, the Stem Cell Initiative, which, through its authorization of $3 billion in general revenue state bonds (to be repaid with at around at least $6 billion in California taxpayer money) for purposes of embryonic stem cell research based on the use of human egg cells ("oocytes"), has now generated heightened public interest and even some debate by "electeds" about this issue.
Accordingly, this seemed an appropriate time to aggregate and re-publish links to a collection of
Etopia Media News Network articles dealing with the subject of the raw material of embryonic stem cells: human oocytes.
Below, you'll find links to 13
Etopia Media News Network articles concerned with the subject of "egg recruitment," also known as "egg farming." Following those links, you'll find additional ones to three articles by
Judy Norsigian, a founding member of the
Boston Women's Health Book Collective and a contributor to the 1998 update of
Our Bodies, Ourselves, one by
Rebecca Dresser, a member of the
The President's Council on Bioethics, and a copy of SB 18, a bill by California State Senator
Deborah Ortiz intended to protect the rights of women donating eggs for embryonic stem cell research under the provisions of California Proposition 71.