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8 - Ethical aspects of stem cell therapy and gene therapy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2014

Søren Holm
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Sean Kehoe
Affiliation:
John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford
Lyn Chitty
Affiliation:
University College Hospital, London
Tessa Homfray
Affiliation:
St George’s University of London
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Summary

Introduction

A therapy can raise ethical issues because of:

  1. ■ its nature – what kind of therapy it is

  2. ■ its complexity

  3. ■ the risks it entails

  4. ■ the uncertainty surrounding estimates of risk and benefits in general or in the specific clinical situation

  5. ■ its cost and/or cost-effectiveness

  6. ■ the use to which it is being put.

Most stem cell and gene therapies that are likely to be developed will actualise some of these elements, for example initially most are likely to be costly. However, most will actualise them in ways that are not significantly different from complex surgical procedures or chemotherapy (at least in the foreseeable future). This could therefore be a very short chapter leading to the conclusion that stem cell and gene therapy raise no ethical issues that have not already been discussed extensively in the literature.

This conclusion might initially surprise some readers because it is so obvious that stem cell and gene therapy research has caused very significant and sustained ethical controversy. However, many of the intractable issues raised in these debates are of considerably less relevance to therapy than to basic research and they will mostly have been resolved at the policy level before the therapies move from research to therapy. Before clinical use becomes possible it will be decided, or in some cases has already been decided, whether there is something so problematic in deliberately making lasting genetic alterations or deriving stem cells from embryos that no therapy should be developed.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reproductive Genetics , pp. 123 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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