Human Stem Cells Created Without Destroying Embryos
This article is for subscribers only.
Ordinary skin cells from the face of a 36-year-old woman and the foreskin of a newborn were turned into stem cells and may have the power to become any cell in the body, according to reports in the journals Science and Cell.
The technique by U.S. and Japanese researchers may shift the ethics debate by ending use of embryos and leapfrog studies by hundreds of companies, including Geron Corp. and Advanced Cell Technology Inc. It may allow human tissue to be more easily created and help drugmakers test how compounds interact with diseased cells, said Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep.