The Use of Fetal Tissue in Research on Parkinson's Disease

In this issue of the Journal, three papers report that transplanting fetal tissue into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease can substantially ameliorate the signs of this disease.1 2 3 An accompanying editorial deals with the scientific and medical aspects of this research.4 Here, we focus on the political and ethical issues.Readers will note that the funding of the two American studies was private, not public. In 1988 the Reagan administration took the extraordinary step of imposing a ban on the use of federal funds to support research of this type — that is, research involving the transplantation of . . .