Stem cell research, scientific freedom and the commodification concern.

For more than a decade, stem cell research has been the topic of oftenpolarized debates about the nature and scope of scientific freedom (Caulfield, 2004; Downie et al, 2005; Foley, 2000; Hsu, 1999; Keane, 2006; Taylor, 2003). Some have suggested that attempts to regulate the field have yielded an unprecedented degree of political interference in the arena of scientific inquiry (Cattaneo & Corbellini, 2011). For instance, many countries, including Canada, have passed legislation that takes the relatively rare step of criminalizing specific research activities, such as creating human embryos for research (Canada, 2004). Most recently, the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg, in a landmark decision with wide-ranging implications for stem cell research and its commercial development in Europe, ruled that methods to manipulate stem cells, such as differentiating them into other cell types, cannot be patented. Regulatory policy and research ethics rules have long placed limits on what research can be done and how it can be undertaken. Such limits have generally been based on issues of human health and safety—such as the regulation of clinical trials or hazardous materials—or the protection of well-established and identifiable individual rights, for instance, respecting the autonomy of research participants. By contrast, many of the justifications for the strict regulation of and the resulting constraints on research involving human embryonic stem cells have been amorphous and contested. There is accordingly little agreement on whether these regulations address traditional or well-established research ethics concerns and norms (Caulfield & Brownsword, 2006).The highly contested claim that some forms of stem cell research undermine human dignity, a common justification for recommending bans on establishing stem cell lines from human embryos and on research cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer), is an excellent example of this phenomenon (President’s Council on Bioethics, 2002). This claim persists even though there is little agreement in either the academic or policy-making communities about how research cloning undermines human dignity or, indeed, about the meaning, scope and demands of the principle of human dignity (Brownsword, 2003; Hayry, 2004; Macklin, 2003; Ogbogu & Caulfield, 2009; Pinker, 2008). In fact, it has been suggested that human dignity is used merely as a slogan, or as a vague placeholder for a variety of imprecise fears about socially controversial science (Macklin, 2003; Ogbogu & Caulfield, 2009; Pinker, 2008). At the very least, all parties seem to agree that dignity is an ambiguous concept that demands a more precise definition when used in policy-making (Harmon, 2009). Another vague term frequently heard in stem cell policy debates is ‘commodification’. The term seems to have emerged in the bioethics and biopolicy lexicon around the late 1990s. An early reference appears in a report issued by the Canadian House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Health that recommended a ban on somatic cell nuclear transfer because “it is unsafe and commodifies the embryo” (Standing Committee on Health, 2001). Ever since, commodification has been frequently deployed in legislation, case law, policy debates and in white papers commissioned by government and private sector institutions. Also, ideas associated with the term turned up in the European Court of Justice’s recent decision on stem cell patents. However, our review of the uses of the term commodification and our analysis of the contexts in which it is used shows that, much like human dignity, the term is rarely defined, and its applications in stem cell policy debates are both varied and imprecise (Table 1). Also, like human dignity, commodification seems to be an attractive justification for science policy precisely because it can mean different things to different people, and because it has an intuitive appeal that is difficult to counter in public debate.