Thursday, August 24, 2006

RE: Stem-Cell-Research News   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I think the best news from that Nature piece is the mere fact that scientists are seriously working on non-embryo-detroying research. On this particular experiment a friend who pays intimate attention to these things points out: "this particular technique does not yet solve the problem, unfortunately. The coverage has been a little murky about what exactly they did, but the paper itself is pretty clear: they did destroy the embryos involved, but they're arguing they showed a kind of proof of concept to suggest that in the future they may not have to."

My Stem-Cell Guy adds, "The concept is that you'd take a single cell from an 8 cell emryo and develop it into an ES cell without destroying the embryo. It's very far from clear that this in fact does not harm the embryo (in a 2005 paper, the bioethics council rejected this idea unanimously as unethical) and in any case this paper doesn't show that's possible."

Again, though, that leading stem-cell scientists are looking to solve the embryo-destruction problem is terrific and should be praised....

08/24 10:05 AMShare