Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) reports that the World Stem Cell Hub is hoping it will be able to use bioethics to help it get on top of its wicked PR problem.
The World Stem Cell Hub is setting up an emergency management team following the resignation of cloning pioneer Prof. Hwang Woo-suk as its president last week over an ethics scandal … A spokesman at the center said the position of president would remain vacant for the time being. Experts on bioethics will be part of the emergency team.
Can’t wait to see the ad for that job: “show dogs wanted.”
And Reuters reports that “Several advertisers have pulled commercials from a South Korean TV prime-time slot because of public anger over the network’s broadcast of a damning report on ethical lapses by a pioneering stem cell scientist.” The anger is so profound that:
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun expressed concern that public sentiment had gone beyond acceptable public debate.
“I was also annoyed by MBC’s reporting,” he said in a message released by his office on Sunday, adding he himself questioned whether MBC needed to be so unrelenting if the purpose had been to raise awareness of an ethical dilemma in scientific research.“But when commercials get cancelled it has gone too far. What we have now is social terror that doesn’t accept objections.”
Over 2,000 messages charging MBC of everything from treason to sensationalism were posted on the network’s Web site on Sunday. “The public is enraged because (MBC) has cast Dr. Hwang as an inhumane criminal,” wrote one viewer, Kim Eun-hee.
Local media reports said journalists who worked on the programme had received threats to them and their families.
The anger has led all but one of 12 advertisers — including Kookmin Bank and GS Holdings Corp — to pull commercials from the documentary programme’s weekly Tuesday night slot or consider such a move.
And Sify news service of India reports from Korea that there is lots at stake for Korea’s soon-to-be-booming medical tourism business. Booming stem cell medical tourism business, that is. The very first stem cell medical tourist hotel, located on a resort island and run by a group that is currently charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for unproven “therapies” that have yet to be tested or published. This has to be read to be believed:
Although some western doctors are sceptical over the proven benefits of [stem cell] treatment, the firm [Histogen] is hoping to build a hospital in South Korea’s tourist island of Jeju, off the country’s southern coast, in the next few years.
Han Hoon, the doctor who heads Histostem, said the hospital would be the first in the world offering only stem-cell therapy.
Since May 2003, Han and his team have been using umbilical cord blood stem-cell therapy to treat patients with medical conditions that other treatments have failed to help such as liver cirrhosis, Buerger’s disease, diabetes, chronic renal failure and a dozen other diseases.
The team’s first patient from the United States is expected to arrive before the end of the year.
Michelle Farrar, 36, from Virginia, was paralysed in a car accident two years ago. She is paying around $100,000 for the treatment without a guarantee of success…
He and his researchers have carried out more than 250 umbilical cord blood stem cell treatments since July 2003, including cases of spinal cord injuries. Han has recently added Alzheimer’s Disease to his list for treatments and is excited about the potential. He has treated two Alzheimer patients in the past six months and the results were “quite impressive,” he said.
A 79-year-old woman who received two injections of stem cells 16 days earlier has been making progress, her son Back Jae-Seoung said.
“Before the injections, she didn’t even recognise me and just stared blankly at TV,” he said. “Now she keeps up her own running commentary on TV drama and knows who I am,” said the 55-year-old businessman.
However, critics say that although Han’s therapy is based on genuine science and may have potential, its benefits remain unproven.
“Medical tests must be backed by scientific papers submitted to authoritative journals for experts’ scrutiny. If you just say ‘Hey, I tried this and it worked well’, you would become a laughing stock,” said Kong Il-Keun, a bio engineering expert of the Suncheon National University.
[file all of this under “only Alta could find this stuff”]