Many of us have grave moral concerns about the methods used to harvest fetal stem cells for medical research. The creation of human life in order to snuff it out for purposes of scientific research is both ghoulish and morally repugnant in our eyes. And yet many of us also believe the research itself is of vital importance -- in my case out of a heartfelt desire to see my wife's illness arrested and reversed. Folks like me cling to the hope that research on adult stem cells will produce treatments and cures -- and agonize over the moral questions raised by fetal stem cell research.

And so it is with great joy and hope that I post this information.

Stem cell scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting today a gene discovery that suggests a way to take adult cells back to an embryonic state -- a discovery that could help treat diseases without relying on controversial human embryonic stem cells or cloning.

The ultimate goal would be to use a patient's own cells as the starting material for a new kind of regenerative medicine. But scientists insisted that they will need to use embryonic cells for the foreseeable future to perfect the new techniques.

A team led by Austin Smith at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Stem Cell Research published the latest results online in the journal Nature. The study used mouse cells to investigate the critical role of one gene in the process by which a stem cell, when fused to a more specialized adult stem cell found in the brain, reprograms the brain cell into a primitive state.

Reprogramming adult cells to give them this core trait of an embryonic stem cell could dramatically reshape both the science and politics of the stem cell field, which is fraught with controversy because the embryonic stem cells require the destruction of human embryos.

For example, reprogramming could make it possible to generate from a patient's skin cells customized cells of other types that had been destroyed by spinal cord injury or diseases such as Parkinson's or diabetes. Self-renewing lines of human cells also might be used to study how genetic diseases come about and how treatments could affect the disease process.

Smith said in an interview that reprogramming could take at least another year of experimental work to be well understood. Yet it no longer seems the deep mystery it was before the latest studies, which reveal the role of a gene known as "nanog."

Smith called nanog "the key gene in the process."

"We thought this was something that would take us a very long time to work out, but now this changes from being a black box to something we can work to understand," he said.

May this research be fruitful and produce results that avoid the moral concerns that current methods raise.

UPDATE: Tammy Bruce writes on this topic here.

Posted by: Greg at 01:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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