China’s Recipe for Stem Cell Success

February 16, 2010

“There is no one China,” a colleague concluded during a discussion of the current state of regenerative medicine in the country. And it is hard to disagree. The streets of Beijing illustrate the stark dichotomy of a state struggling to blend its new high tech and economic growth with the old-school feel of communist rule: cranes build luxurious skyscraper condominiums while Google struggles to make the Internet fully accessible. Mirrored in the yin-yang dichotomy of the stem cell field, China has quickly risen as a stem cell powerhouse but has struggled to set regulations that would impinge on the clinical availability of unproven therapies to patients from China and around the world. (Science Progress)