Genetics and Health

Genetics Research in Canada

by Hsien Hsien Lei, PhD on October 13th, 2005

Given the current political climate in the U.S., I had assumed that other countries were more liberal in their attitudes toward biomedical research. Especially when it comes to stem cell research, Asia, for example, is continuously forging ahead with the establishment of stem cell banks and permissive or flexible policies.

Virginia Postrel discusses the situation in Canada:

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada’s law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It’s a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

In the same article, I also learned that not everyone is looking forward to personalized medicine:

Genetic research also offends egalitarians. They fear that the rich will benefit first or that money for research will come from social programs. Social justice, argues Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics & Society in Oakland, Calif., “means not just ‘no designer babies,’ but also ‘no designer medicine.’”

Pointer from Gene Expression.

Share This

Related Stories

Rare identical quads born in Canada
The wonders of evolution - dolphins at play!
Ethics of Genetics Conference in Calgary, Canada
Don’t Let Genes Typecast You
New meningitis vaccine appears safe for babies

POSTED IN: General Genetics and Health