According to Professor Richard Gardner, a stem cell expert based at Oxford University, people are “emphasising the promise” and “failing to highlight the problems that are yet to be overcome”.
“And in the meantime,” he says, “there is the real concern about the stem cell cowboys.”
“You’ve got these people charging thousands of pounds to inject dubious cells into people suffering from diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and people who are chasing couples about to give birth and charging them thousands of pounds to store their baby’s umbilical cord cells.”
This is unethical, he says, because there are some fundamental problems regarding how these stem cells, whether they are adult, foetal or embryonic, will behave once they are in the body.