New techniques have been developed, however, to make induced pluripotent stem cells without permanent genetic modifications that were associated with tumors.
Induced pluripotent stem cells can come from any cell in the human body, including skin cells, so they don't have the moral quandaries surrounding them.
Her enthusiasm for the promise of adult stem cell therapies and induced pluripotent stem cells (adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells) was evident.
With colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Bhatia is trying to coax hepatocytes from so-called induced pluripotent stem cells--adult cells that can be reprogrammed into stem cells.
What remains to be seen is whether these cloned embryonic stem cells are more useful therapeutically than the noncontroversial induced pluripotent stem cells, and questions linger about their effectiveness.
Since that time, more advanced cloning technologies have evolved, including the iPS system of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown from nearly any skin cell.
Defenders of embryonic stem cell work say that it is important even in understand adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells, which resemble the embryonic cells but can be created without destroying embryos.
Let's be clear: this is not about embryonic stem cell research, which, despite the hype may deliver something given time, although the alternatives of adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells look set to deliver results much quicker.
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In mice, Daley and colleagues have shown that stem cells derived from the nuclear transfer of cells to make embryos -- the technique described in Mitalipov's paper -- were indeed closer to natural embryo stem cells than induced pluripotent stem cells.
For an academic scientist, Lee Rubin at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) has a great deal of biotech industry experience, and this has inspired some ingenious experiments with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for disease modeling and drug discovery.
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That technique for generating embryonic-like stem cells (called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells) bypassed the need for transferring the cells into eggs, as Wilmut had done, and also averted the ethical issues attached to extracting stem cells from embryos as Thomson had done.
Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the millions of fat cells removed during liposuction can be easily and quickly turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, more easily than the skin cells that researchers used when the first iPS cells were created in 2007.
While cloning stem cells is a technical breakthrough, there's already a method of deriving embryonic-like stem cells that doesn't require the use of embryos at all: induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, said Dr. George Daley, who is director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Children's Hospital Boston and an international expert in stem cells.
The technique takes the same sample of skin cells but converts them using proteins to "induced pluripotent" stem cells.
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