We’ve collectively assumed that the only way to harvest embryonic stem cells was through aborted human tissue or embryonic material (yeah, yeah I’m fully aware of the loaded terminology and I chose the words carefully). Turns out that assumption may be wrong; maybe we can grow them from a single harvested cell.
Wired News is reporting that researchers at Chicago-based Reproductive Genetics Institute believe they can extract a single cell—a blastomere—from an eight-celled organism called a morula and subsequently grow more embryonic stem cells from the harvested seed cell. Taking a single cell from a morula doesn’t harm it and there’s evidence that the embryonic stem cells produced from the balstomere are more powerful than cells harvested from organisms even a week older.
There are proposed techniques that side-step the moral controversy of destroying tissue that surrounds embryonic stem cell research, including the use of dead embryos from fertilization clinics (problem: there’s no way to tell if an embryo is dead) and using cloning technology to create an organism that has no potential to become a human being (problem: too blatant an attempt to end-run the moral issue).
Some believe California’s US$3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative research fund makes all of this a waste of time and resoures. “The California funding decision has made the deliberation of the bioethics committee somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant,” Arthur Kaplan, director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics, told Wired News.
For the rest of us, hope springs eternal.
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