The ethical quagmire surrounding human embryonic stem cell research is getting even stickier.
It seems that some of the cell lines sanctioned for use by the current US administration may have been obtained without proper consent from the women who provided the original embryos. The ethical storm could halt some federally funded stem cell research.
But Robert Streiffer, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has now obtained the original consent documents from the NIH using the federal Freedom of Information Act.