The field of stem cell research continues to hurtle ahead at a remarkable clip, and over the past decade, the nations of the world have responded in markedly different ways to this work’s potential. Concerns over incommensurate governance and policy interoperability of stem cell research from nation to nation have been scrutinized in the literature; however, the issue of inconsistent intellectual property and research regimes within nations themselves has not yet been thoroughly addressed. These internal inconsistencies have the potential to put researchers in unusually precarious positions with respect to their research methodology and output. This paper represents a first attempt to demarcate the boundaries of what might be called “intraoperability problems” in stem cell research by considering the interplay of intellectual property and research regimes in four jurisdictions that are major global centers for stem cell research.