An Offshore Haven for Human Embryonic Stem-Cell Research?

U.S. scientists studying human embryonic stem cells face unprecedented political, regulatory, and financial barriers created by the Bush administration's restrictive policies and by the ongoing national debate over the ethics of such research. The most promising method of making patient-specific and disease-specific embryonic stem-cell lines _ somatic-cell nuclear transfer _ is also the most ethically troubling for many people, because it requires both the creation of embryos for research purposes and the recruitment of women as egg donors. The procedure, in which the nucleus of a somatic cell is inserted into an oocyte, providing the genes for the development of an early-stage embryo, is not yet being performed in the United States.

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Now, Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean veterinarian and stem-cell biologist whose laboratory leads the world in the use of this technique, is planning to offer researchers in the United States and other countries a chance to work with such cell lines without having to make them themselves. Hwang's plan provides a possible strategy for accelerating international progress in the field and avoiding some of the legal...