History of Exporting Science

The globalization of science began earlier than many other fields when students would come to America and Western Europe to study and bring back to their country what they learned. In the beginning, these students would end up working in America or Europe, but as research opportunities expanded and countries developed the infrastructure to support long-term research, more and more graduates were choosing to go back to their home countries and do research there. While research overseas is booming, here in the United States, we have been slowed down in what we can accomplish due to restrictions on research and stringent laws affecting clinical trials.

The push for more research overseas was given a big boost when in August of 2001, President Bush signed into law the embryonic stem cell restrictions. The bill forbid the harvesting of new embryonic stem cells, which are taken from 5-day old embryos, and restricted research to twenty or so existing embryonic stem cell lines, most of which are of poor quality. This forced researchers, many of whom were making real progress, to halt their experiments indefinitely. Many researchers, unsure when they would be able to restart their experiments, decided to take jobs overseas where restrictions are much more lax. Places like Singapore are benefiting from the restrictions in the United States, building cutting edge research parks and attracting top-level talent. However, all this economic growth centered around a set of laws in another country begs the question what will happen when the restrictions are lifted. President Obama has already vowed to end the restrictions put in place by the Bush Administration. At the same time, the same researchers that fled overseas to do their research are returning home, leaving countries new to the research world scrambling to fill the positions many think they don’t have the home-grown talent yet to fill.

Laws are beginning to be reversed, but not without controversy. Michigan recently passed a law allowing for the derivation of embryonic stem cells lines from embryos left over from In-vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatment. This is a hot topic since researchers wonder why tens of thousands of already-made embryos are remaining frozen indefinitely, though they will never be used for IVF treatment. There are also fears of the lax restrictions overseas becoming a real health issue, especially with stories like the one about a young boy with a rare genetic disease who had fetal stem cells injected into his brain in a Moscow clinic and now has micro-tumors. However, there is hope for those who think we will never resolve this particular dilemma. Researchers at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto have recently used skin cells to create cells that are identical to embryonic stem cells, providing a possible way of avoiding stem cell restrictions and reestablishing stem cell research in the United States.

Another major issue is that of clinical trials. By the end of 2007, 1/3 of all of the clinical trials done by the top twenty pharmaceutical companies in the United States were done in other countries. There are many reasons for this, including obvious cost differences and the availability of large populations to quicken clinical trials. A clinical case at a top-level research clinic overseas costs one-tenth of what a second-rate research clinic in the United States would cost. There are also large populations in which to find cases for the clinical trials, many of whom are paid more than their annual income to participate in the clinical trials. This raises ethical issues about clinical trials overseas, especially since the drugs in the trial will most likely be sold primarily in America and Western Europe and the subjects they are being tested on will never receive the benefits of the drugs once they are approved.

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~ by owen370 on March 3, 2009.