Time to reconsider stem cell ethics--the importance of induced pluripotent cells.

The discovery of an alternative method of producing induced human stem cells will affect the ethical evaluation of human embryonic stem cell research On 20 November 2007 two groups of researchers announced that they had independently managed to produce induced Pluripotent Cells (iPC) from human adult (ie not embryonic or foetal) somatic cells. 2 The two groups used slightly different procedures, but both approaches involved overexpression of a group of four genes known to be actively expressed in human embryonic stem cells (hESC). The cells produced are very similar to human embryonic stem cells, they are pluripotent and they differentiate to specific cell types when treated according to protocols leading to that specific differentiation in hESC.