Article Text
Abstract
In the October edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Akabayashi and colleagues state that ’to establish a heterogeneous [induced pluripotent stem cell] iPSC bank covering roughly 80% of Japan’s population…the Japanese government decided to invest JPY110 billion (US$ 1.1 billion) over 10 years in regenerative medicine research; a quarter of this was to be allocated to the iPSC stock project'. While they claim this amount of money to be an unfair distribution of state resources, we believe their assessment is based on a misunderstanding of the facts. Similarly, other criticisms by them are based on mistaken interpretations. This article is a rebuttal to the arguments that form the basis of Akabayashi and colleagues’ five criticisms by explaining their misinterpretations.
- stem cell research
- distributive justice
- resource allocation
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors MF: conceptualisation, writing original draft and editing. KT: writing original draft and editing.
Funding Supported in part by the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education.
Competing interests The opinions expressed in this paper are the authors’ own and do not represent those of the CiRA of Kyoto University.
Patient consent Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Other content recommended for you
- Endangerment of the iPSC stock project in Japan: on the ethics of public funding policies
- What are considered ‘good facts’?
- Cell and organ bioengineering technology as applied to gastrointestinal diseases
- Clinical applications of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells in cardiovascular medicine
- Current outlook of cardiac stem cell therapy towards a clinical application
- Emerging NK cell therapies for cancer and the promise of next generation engineering of iPSC-derived NK cells
- Embryo as epiphenomenon: some cultural, social and economic forces driving the stem cell debate
- News
- In vitro eugenics
- Advances in regenerative medicine for otolaryngology/head and neck surgery