While the lazy bastard scientists in the US with bloodlust for embryos wring their hands over not being able to get federal cooch for their little escapades, yet another scientist in another part of the world has made a stem cell advancement that doesn’t involve the destruction of embryos.

Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice1, 2, 3. The race is now on to apply the surprisingly straightforward procedure to human cells.

If researchers succeed, it will make it relatively easy to produce cells that seem indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, and that are genetically matched to individual patients. There are limits to how useful and safe these would be for therapeutic use in the near term, but they should quickly prove a boon in the lab.

“It would change the way we see things quite dramatically,” says Alan Trounson of Monash University in Victoria, Australia. Trounson wasn’t involved in the new work but says he plans to start using the technique “tomorrow”. “I can think of a dozen experiments right now — and they’re all good ones,” he says.

In theory, embryonic stem cells can propagate themselves indefinitely and are able to become any type of cell in the body. But so far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells involves destroying an embryo, and to get a genetic match for a patient would mean, in effect, cloning that person — all of which raise difficult ethical questions.

As well as having potential ethical difficulties, the ‘cloning’ procedure is technically difficult. It involves obtaining unfertilized eggs, replacing their genetic material with that from an adult cell and then forcing the cell to divide to create an early-stage embryo, from which the stem cells can be harvested. Those barriers may have now been broken down.

“Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary. I’ve never worked with either,” says Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who has pioneered the new technique.

Apparently the federal funding of embryos isn’t the real problem with the shit research coming out of this country; instead it’s the singular blinder-induced implications that without starting with embryos, research can never progress. It’s about time our “finest” scientists got off their ass and started catching up and stop whining about why they can’t. As of right now, the rest of the world is running circles around us and they aren’t using embryonic stem cells to do it.

Source: Nature.com

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