(1) Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, The School of Law, University of Manchester, UK
Abstract:
The European Union is a nightmare from the perspective of the ethics and regulation of science. A hitherto insoluble problem
has been the task of drafting ethical principles which do not founder on the radically different attitudes taken to the question
of the moral status of the human embryo. Following the conclusions reached in an international project, EUROSTEM, we suggest
that this problem can be solved by concentration on the scope of principles and we emphasize that European research should
be funded in a way that does not discriminate between individual states and researchers in the EU. Finally, we observe that
the availability of any eventual embryonic stem cell therapies will pose a dilemma for those countries and those people that
have declared stem cell research to be unacceptable.