The discovery that adult cells could be ‘reprogrammed’ and converted into stem cells caused a great deal of excitement among scientists. There are high hopes that this new technology will help us study, understand and eventually treat disease. But researchers still face a number of challenges, as shown by several recent studies.

Rogue clinics are the scourge of the serious enterprise of stem cell research and its application. They are a risk to patients and to a respectable field of scientific and clinical endeavour with very laudable aims. Therefore rational stem cell scientists will be keen to promote any realistic measure to deal with them. Many are taking action by working to produce agreed guidelines for best practice, and helping to educate regulators and members of the public. In an article published in EMBO Reports, Master and Resnik [1] argue that stem cell scientists should do more to tackle these rogue clinics by controlling access to materials and methods through documents called Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs). You can read a short summary of their proposal in our introduction. I do not think this particular strategy is useful for several reasons.