Promoting Public Trust: ESCROs Won't Fix the Problem of Stem Cell Tourism

Abstract

We agree with Greely (2013) that embryonic stem cell research oversight (ESCRO) committees have probably helped to promote ethics in stem cell research (SCR). In this commentary, we draw attention to a few issues that we suspect neither ESCROs nor any current form of governance of SCR is likely to fix. These issues cast a certain degree of social skepticism toward SCR that may prevent some publics from trusting SCR and in other cases, may actually lead to a loss of public trust. These include (1) a lack of a suitable ethical resolution over the moral status of human embryos and the harms to women as ova providers and whether eggs and embryos should be used for SCR, (2) the public’s unmet expectations of the therapeutic promises from SCR, and (3) the delivery of bogus therapies to patients in what is commonly referred to as the stem cell tourism industry. Public trust and public support for science are complex and multifaceted: There is no single “public” and different publics have differing levels of trust (Resnik 2011). In a similar vein, how individuals support science is also intricate, as some may support it through financial donations, performing research or teaching science, participating in clinical trials, voting for a president or other elected officials who are pro-research, or donating their body as cadavers to support medical training (Master and Resnik 2011a). In addition, there is no established causal relationship between public trust and the public support for science (Master and Resnik 2011a; Resnik 2011). Although it can help promote public trust, good governance does not guarantee it. Also, those who are troubled by SCR because they believe in the moral worth of human embryos will never trust the regulatory system, irrespective of how much oversight we place on the field. In addition, public trust in SCR may diminish as awareness of unmet promises and the harms caused by the stem cell tourism industry increase.