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THERE'S trouble brewing over stem cells in Texas, and it raises a big question for the future of medicine. How should we regulate treatments that use cells taken from a patient's own body?

If the cells are grown in culture, then the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) views them as "drugs", which must undergo a lengthy approval process. That has enraged clients of a company in Houston called Celltex, who argue that the government has no business telling them what they can and can't do with their own body parts (see "Fight for the right to stem cells").

However, there is minimal oversight of clinics that don't culture cells, because simple transplants are a "practice of medicine", which the FDA doesn't control. That is a concern, given anecdotal reports of problems, such as a woman who had shards of bone growing in her eyelid after stem cell injections.

This incoherent situation arises from trying to shoehorn stem cells into a regulatory system designed for conventional drugs. One solution would be to create a new body to regulate...