ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the ways in which various patients and their associations came to regard themselves as the users of future stem cell technologies. For Finn Kristensen, President of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) in Denmark, it was likewise the encounter with the lists of curative prospects for diabetes through stem cell research that prompted his engagement. The engagement of one of the other associations found to be active in relation to stem cell research, the Danish Spinal Cord Injuries Association, had taken a slightly different path. In their extensive work on the French patient association, Association Francaise contre les Myopathies (AFM), Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon have highlighted several developments in the ways in which patient associations engage with research Human embryonic Stem Cells (hESC) are cells that, given the right conditions, have the potentiality to become any cell in the human body.