Scientists in the United States and Japan announced yesterday that they have developed artificial stem cells from adult mouse cells. If the approach can be retooled for humans, they say, it would avoid the ethical quicksand that surrounds the use of stem cells drawn from nascent human embryos.
Current stem-cell extraction methods destroy these embryos, which during the procedure are microscopic, hollow balls of cells only a few days old. For people who hold that human life begins at the moment of conception, destroying an embryo at any stage of development is tantamount to killing humans.
In addition, another group of US scientists says it has derived embryonic stem cells in mice using an approach that, if scaled to humans, would avoid the need for women to donate unfertilized eggs to produce large numbers of embryonic stem-cells for research. Instead, researchers could use non-viable embryos that fertility clinics and their patients would have disposed of anyway.
This would be very good news.
We’ll soon see if abortion and stem cell research proponents are truly interested in the end product (i.e. successful and ethical production and/or use of stem cells) or whether the political agenda of “controlling ‘our’ bodies” is more important.
Many more advances have been made using stem cells not harvested from human embryos (adult stem cells, etc.). I just need to find the article I cam across recently…
The measured slowness of the pace on stem cell research is resulting in the reality that we needn’t kill humans to get stem cells. The ethical wisdom of this approach is steadily being revealed against the pundits who allege that the US is falling behind. Actually, we are forging ahead in a responsible manner and I certainly trust that this research will yield (in decades, not months or years) the benefits wished for by the advocates of stem cell research.