Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
A breakthrough discovery in stem cell research made headlines last week — as much for the ethics implications of the advance as for the science itself.

Researchers in Japan and the United States announced that they coaxed human skin tissue into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The technique avoids the highly controversial process of creating and destroying embryos to produce stem cells, which some scientists predict will be the key to generating new tissue to replace body parts ravaged by disease or injury, according to TIME magazine.

While the promise of stem cell research has been evident for more than a decade, the New York Times notes that ethics issues have surfaced from the start as well.

James Thompson, who in 1998 was one of the first to cultivate an embryonic stem cell and was one of the researchers involved in the latest breakthrough, told the Times that he had ethical concerns about stem cell research from the outset.

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said. “I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

Last week’s developments come amid a recent avalanche of discoveries in the field: Two weeks ago, a method for coaxing human stem-cell tissue from primate embryos dominated headlines. But according to an analysis from the Economist, that method did not completely sidestep ethics objections and also produced cells that apparently are more prone to mutating into cancers.