Along with her colleague, David Magnus, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Mildred Cho, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, and Associate Director, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, published a paper in the
May 20, 2005 issue of Science in which they commented upon the inadequacy of the informed consent forms provided for egg donors participating in
Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk's team's recent embryonic stem cell research breakthrough, and proposed the creation of a new category of bio-medical volunteer, "research donor," to protect the rights of women who donate eggs for use in embryonic stem cell research.
Dr. Cho spoke by phone from the Medical Center at Stanford University today with
Etopia Media Medical News Network about a number of current bio-ethical issues surrounding the donation of eggs for embryonic stem cell research.
You can listen to that conversation in its entirety by clicking
here.
To access a press release from the Office of Communications & Public Affairs at the Stanford School of Medicine entitled "Stanford Bioethicists Want Stronger Protections for Women Donating Eggs for Stem Cell Research," describing the content of the paper by Drs. Cho and Magnus, click
here.
During this interview, Dr. Cho told
Etopia Media Medical News Network that she believes that properly-informed egg donors, even if they receive no compensation for their donations, including no royalties from treatments developed with the help of their eggs, and no insurance coverage of treatment for conditions they may develop as a result of the hormone treatments required to stimulate their ovulation, will still come forward, for altruistic reasons, to donate eggs in numbers adequate to meet the requirements of the various embryonic stem cell projects that require their eggs to do their experiments.
Dr. Cho explained the anomaly of a generic Stanford undergraduate woman being able to walk across El Camino Real into Palo Alto and be paid in the neighborhood of $10,000 for her egg donations to be used at
a fertility clinic for in vitro fertilization while, if she went instead to the Stanford University Medical Center and donated the same egg(s) for use at the
Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine for purposes of bio-medical research on embryonic stem cells, she'd be paid nothing because of the ethical strictures on doing so due to the fact that embryonic stem cell research is very heavily regulated and monitored, while fertility clinics and the entire assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry are not.
