THE CASE FOR AN ETHICS RESEARCH CONSORTIUM FOR EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF STEM CELL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT.

Emerging technologies have gained notoriety as a catalyst of socioeconomic progress, but have also inspired a revolution in ethics. Here, we provide an overview of ethics in stem cell-based therapies and offer a compelling argument for a need to establish an Ethics Research Consortium that will be tasked to assemble an interdisciplinary panel of experts who will apply ethical principles to analyze the social merit relative to the economic incentives of this emerging technology. Milestone studies on cell therapy in Parkinson's disease and stroke over the last two decades were the focus of this commentary.