Mansooreh Saniei, PhD candidate at SSHM and member of the Research Group Biomedicine, Ethics and Social Justice, just published a paper in Social Science & Medicine drawing upon her Wellcome Trust funded research on the regulation of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) science in Iran. She identified three main rationales underlying Iranian policies on this topic: (1) the particular flexibility of the Shia tradition in this respect; (2) the context of permissive policies related to other fields of biomedicine, such as new assisted reproductive technologies; and (3) a lack of public debate of bioscience in Iran.