From the New York Times comes the exciting news that we may not need embryonic stem cells after all.
The news that human skin cells can be turned into cells that behave rather like embryonic stem cells should be good news on both sides of the debate, as it will allow medical research to continue without the ethical implications involved in destroying human embryos. From the article:
Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work, conducted by independent teams from Japan and Wisconsin, should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.“Everyone was waiting for this day to come,” said the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “You should have a solution here that will address the moral objections that have been percolating for years,” he added.
Although there's still some talk about the need to continue embryonic stem cell research, there's no question that this approach will have an enormous impact on the work and on the debates surrounding it. The interesting thing to ponder is that without the pressure to come up with an ethical alternative to embryonic stem cells, this breakthrough might never have been made; yet in the long run, it will quite possibly be simpler and less expensive to obtain stem cells in this way. There's no denying that this is ultimately going to be a win for both sides of a polarized debate, an extremely rare thing in this day and age.
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Well, this is good news; Great news. I am hopefull that in the future standard medicine will not have or need to have human eggs, human embryoes or stem cell lines from human embryoes as commodity or stock material.
As a society we will be better of this way. No doubt about it.
Any research on human embryoes, especially any destructive work should be done only for the basic study of embryogenesis or other basic research insights.
The politics on all this has made strange bedfellows, as described by Joseph Bottums in "First Things":
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=904
Peace to All
Jason,
You are the one who should chill.
There never was the conflict between science and religion that many seem to suggest here. True, the pro-life community and associated researchers are as scientific as any.
So I am not going to chill, but on this Thanksgiving day GIVE THANKS for ethical science and its practicioners, and for all the good it does for the people of the world, in spite of the sometimes lack of ethical compass in many researchers.
SiliconValleySteve: "Congratulations to President Bush. Gently pushing the scientific community by restricting grants has pushed reseachers to create a more moral alternative."
Sorry to burst that dream, but the quest to create stem cells and attempts to manipulate developmental pathways and "reverse" cell differentiation was a research goal long before Bush. It's all part of the "how the heck do cells do that?" basic research question. Researchers are trying to solve basic questions AND see if such research has a useful applications. Consequently, they attack the problems from multiple directions using multiple systems because there is no telling which ones will provide the most useful information.
I'm glad that we may be finding a scientific method of creating stem cells that does not offend the deeply religious.
What has always offended me, of course, is that idea that an abandoned embryo frozen in a fertility lab that has a 99.9% chance of never becoming a born human being (the isolated "snowflake" stories aside) is considered MORE important than Michael J. Fox or both of my grandfathers or anyone else suffering horrifically with a chronic disease (including, from self-interest, me -- though stem cells also don't seem that applicable to my condition).
I would not be all that concerned about ranking our relative importance Larry. Let us just be glad that there will be no foreseeable mass trafficing in or commoditization of human embryoes or human eggs.
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