Genetics Research in Canada

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.