a person · United States of AmericaLeigh Turner
also: Leigh G. Turner
The bioethicist who counts the clinics. His method in the stem cell work is to enumerate what is being sold, which is why the numbers survive argument.
Professor in the Department of Health, Society, & Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the UC Irvine Center for Health Ethics. His faculty page states that his "primary research program addresses ethical, legal, social, and public health issues related to stem cells and regenerative medicine". He has published on cross-border care since 2010 and is the principal source of counts for the American market in unapproved cell products.
The story Cited · turner-2021-stem-cell-sell
The work that matters most here is arithmetic. With Paul Knoepfler in Cell Stem Cell in 2016 he enumerated the businesses selling stem cell interventions directly to American consumers. Five years later he published the recount: "In March 2021, 1,480 U.S. businesses operating 2,754 clinics were found selling purported stem cell treatments for various indications" — "more than four times as many businesses than were identified 5 years ago", selling products "that are not FDA-approved and lack convincing evidence of safety and efficacy".
Inference — that finding cuts across this subject's usual framing. Unproven cell treatment is written about as something patients fly abroad for; the count says the largest market for it is inside the country most of those patients live in.
His earlier cross-border papers took the industry's intermediaries as the object rather than the hospitals: accreditation and regulatory oversight of medical travel companies in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care in 2011, and the Canadian companies marketing medical travel in Globalization and Health in 2012, which examined what those companies actually told prospective patients.
Before Irvine he was at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics and School of Public Health, at McGill's Biomedical Ethics Unit as a William Dawson Scholar, at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, and a research associate at the Hastings Center.
Notes
No birth year is published in the sources read for this record. "Medical tourism: assessing the evidence on treatment abroad" is by Lunt and Carrera and is sometimes misattributed to him; it is not his.
The particulars
| role | ethicist, researcher |
|---|---|
| iso2 | United States of America (US) |
| region | North America, Everywhere |
| links | UC Irvine faculty profile · The American stem cell sell in 2021 (Cell Stem Cell) · Selling stem cells in the USA (Cell Stem Cell, 2016) |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- Leigh Turner — faculty profile — University of California, Irvine, Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health · link (read 2026-09-16)
- The American stem cell sell in 2021: U.S. businesses selling unlicensed and unproven stem cell interventions — Cell Stem Cell 2021;28(11):1891-1895 (Turner L), doi:10.1016/j.stem.2021.10.008 · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Selling Stem Cells in the USA: Assessing the Direct-to-Consumer Industry — Cell Stem Cell 2016;19(2):154-157 (Turner L, Knoepfler P) · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Quality in health care and globalization of health services: accreditation and regulatory oversight of medical tourism companies — International Journal for Quality in Health Care 2011;23(1):1-7 (Turner L), doi:10.1093/intqhc/mzq078 · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Beyond 'medical tourism': Canadian companies marketing medical travel — Globalization and Health 2012;8:16 (Turner L), doi:10.1186/1744-8603-8-16 · link (read 2026-09-17)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.