Globe and Mail - Dr. Brinkley's Stem Lotion & Magic Elixir

It's a global gold rush - clinics and cosmetics companies offering miraculous results using stem cells. They sound too good to be true, and that's probably because they're not true, scientists say. Worse, no one knows the health risks. Carolyn Abraham looks behind this tide of 21st-century snake oil…

Dr. Kimmelman, a biomolecular researcher and ethicist at McGill University in Montreal, says the 1990s was the "pre-global era" of medicine. Despite the excitement around potential DNA-based treatments at the time, gene-therapy clinics did not spring up in far-flung locales the way stem-cell centres are now, says the former chair of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.