Barbarianism aids technological advancement

I was reading the special Financial Times report on the international status of stem cell research in Scientific American. Besides the disturbing future of business (Financial Times) and biotech, I read this, here:

...But the Chinese scene is still dominated by adult stem cell work. "There is a very significant focus on clinical translation, which is much more palatable in China than in the US or Europe", says Stephen Minger of King's College London. "Treatments will be pushed ahead more quickly than in the West".

A colourful example is Jianhong Zhu of Huashan Hospital, part of Shanghai's Fudan University. He is working with adult neural stem cells, extracted from brain tissues exposed in patients who suffer open head wounds. (A classic local example is the "chopstick injury", in which a barbed bamboo chopstick is pushed--usually through an eye socket--into the head during an argument over a meal; when the stick is removed, enough brain tissue sticks to it to be a source of neural stem cells.) Zhu has obtained encouraging results from a clinical trial in which eight such patients had their own neural stem cells cultured and transplanted back into the site of their injury; they fared significantly better than eight matched controls who had open brain surgery but no cell grafting.