Oocyte markets: women's reproductive work in embryonic stem cell research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) research, otherwise known as therapeutic cloning, requires large numbers of research oocytes, placing pressure on an already limited supply. In the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and most of Western Europe, oocytes are made available through modestly reimbursed donation, and, owing to the onerous nature of donation, the existing demand for reproductive oocytes far outstrips availability. SCNT research will place this system under even greater pressure. This paper investigates the growth in a global market for oocytes, where transnational IVF clinics broker sales between generally poor, female vendors and wealthy purchasers, beyond the borders of national regulation, and with little in the way of clinical or bioethical scrutiny. It considers the possible impact that SCNT research will have on this global market. It argues that oocyte vending could be understood as a kind of reproductive labor in the bioeconomy, and suggests some ways to improve the protection, security and power of vendors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".