Spare Embryos and Stem Cell Research: Consent Issues
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Embryonic stem cells are touted as a source of promising treatment for debilitating diseases such as Parkinsons, Alzheimers, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and many others. (1) In order to exploit therapeutic potential of stem cells, extensive research is required on risks and benefits of their use. (2) Respect for ethical boundaries should be included in this risk-benefit evaluation. Different sources of stem cells have different therapeutic potential. The four sources of stem cells are: embryonic stem cells (hESC), adult stem cells (ASC), stem cells of aborted foetuses, and finally, umbilical cord stem cells. hESC are either totipotent or pluripotent. Totipotent cells are found when embryo is composed of eight cells or less. Each totipotent cell is capable of developing into a complete organism. (3) Pluripotent cells can differentiate into many cellular types but they cannot create an entire organism (i.e. an embryo), hESC that come from blastocyst, an embryonic structure found six days post-fertilization, are pluripotent. (4) Spare embryos at blastocyst stage can provide pluripotent hESC. For their part, ASC are multipotent, that is, they can differentiate into certain specialized cellular types. (5) but most often are committed to a single function. (6) Their principal function is to replace differentiated cells in a particular tissue when it is damaged or old. (7) Cells from aborted foetuses are multipotent. These cells can come, for example, from neural foetal tissue and be derived into neural stem ceils. Cells from umbilical cord also form part of this multipotent cell type category. Haematopoietic stem cells can be extracted from umbilical cord and represent an interesting alternative to bone marrow graft. (8) The therapeutic potential of each of these stem cell types remains to be established. Each seems full of promise but only research will tell. The most controversial is that which requires creation of embryos for research. Indeed, current restrictions on deliberate creation of embryos for research (9) have led researchers to go to another existing source of embryos: surplus embryos left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF). Access depends on donation by couple of embryos for research purposes. It is spare embryos of pluripotent potential that are subject of this paper. To date, donor consent to research on surplus embryos has been general in nature. Since March 4, 2002, however, Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Research: Guidelines for CIHR-Eunded Research (hereinafter referred to as Guidelines) require a specific consent for stem cell research. The major reasons provided are as follows: immortalized cell lines will be created that will continue to divide indefinitely and could be used in different research projects for many years; these cell lines could have an important commercial value (10) (without profiting embryo donors themselves) and such research necessarily requires destruction of embryos. In Canada, in absence of adoption of An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproductive Technologies and Related Research (Bill C-13), (11) it is CIHR Guidelines that govern ethical review of stem cell research protocols. Since 1998, Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Human, (hereinafter referred to as the Tri-Council Policy Statement) governs process of ethical review of research. Obviously, general common law and civil law principles and procedures governing consent also apply. We will begin our study of issue of consent to stem cell research with a brief analysis of Bill C-13, followed by Tri-Council, Policy Statement and CIHR Guidelines. We will then examine conformity of consent forms used in eight Canadian fertility centres prior to 2003 against these norms. Finally, we will argue that stem cell research on spare embryos is not really that unique. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it