18 R.M. Shaw
disclosure of information. To what extent are pharmaceutical companies
and medical institutions obliged to tell donors about what is going to
happen to their tissues, and what does it mean for informed consent
when the outcome of highly experimental iPSC research is uncertain?
Do donors have a right to information about the economic aspects and
potential biovalue of their tissue donation? MacGregor et al. take the
view that current ethical and informed consent practices and guidelines
are not adequate for emerging biotechnologies, such as iPSCs, and that
new methods of communicating informed consent to research partici-
pants are required.
In the third chapter of this section, on the everyday ethics of stem
cell therapies in India, authors Nayantara Sheoran Appleton and Aditya
Bharadwaj draw on fieldwork to discuss the regulatory and bioethical
guidance frameworks around stem cell treatment in India, which they
describe as in a state of continuous evolution. Appleton and Bharadwaj
contend that while some scholars have identified a regulatory vacuum
with regard to stem cell innovation in Asian countries, the examination
of the everyday complexities of doing stem cell research and treating
patients in India allows us to imagine a new bioethics—one that is cog-
nisant of its Western genealogy, but also accounts for how biomedicine
and biotechnologies are lived, experienced and engaged within diverse
global spaces. Their chapter draws attention to the concerns raised by
other researchers about stem cell travel, where adult patients and parents
of paediatric patients from around the world travel to clinics to seek
(sometimes unproven) therapies, to argue that a singular focus on the
global dimensions of bioethics and medical tourism can leave important
considerations about local contexts, practices and sites hidden.
Part II: Assisted Human Reproduction
By the mid- to late 1990s, a new wave of materialist writing began
to emerge in the social sciences around assisted human reproduction.
This literature has evolved from a focus on the lived experience of peo-
ple seeking fertility treatment and the views of donors, to the views of
donor-conceived persons and concerns around property rights and
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