End of Stem Cell debate at hand?

[LaWood]

Maybe one more arrow has been removed from the Rightwing Attack Machine.

New Stem Cell Method Could Ease Ethical Concerns

Two teams of scientists are reporting today that they turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.

The reprogrammed skin cells may yet prove to have subtle differences from embryonic stem cells that come directly from human embryos, and the new method includes potentially risky steps, like introducing a cancer gene. But stem cell researchers say they are confident that it will not take long to perfect the method and that today’s drawbacks will prove to be temporary.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/scien ... ref=slogin

[Dardedar]

Two teams of scientists are reporting today that they turned human skin cells into

DAR
Ooooh, but what about those poor innocent skin cells!?

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The Daily Kos people went at this one hammer and tongs (the Huffington Post people did, too) - seems those 4 genes they added were spliced from cancer cells, which makes the resulting "stem cells" problematic. And the researchers themselves said they had to have embryonic stem cells to compare their generated "stem cells" to as they continued their research. Back to the old drawing board?

I still don't understand people who have hysterics over using blastocytes destined for the chemical sink for medical research. Believe it or not, one of Boozman's staffers actually told me those embryos shouldn't be used for research because some poor infertile woman needed them so she could have a baby. Sigh.