As the ACT mendacity continues to roil the biotech debate, a former scientist at the company, Jose Cibelli, has achieved an advance that might one day lead to the ability to revert normal body cells into an embryonic state. (I once debated Cibelli and found him to be a thoroughly nice guy.) Cibelli, who once did much of the cloning work at ACT but left for Michigan where all human cloning is outlawed, is looking for the genes that controls cell differentiation. His hope is to find one transforms early embryo cells into stem cells. If he does, he hopes to be able to apply it to normal body cells and revert them to the stem cell state.
As I stated in a piece I wrote last week, we should never underestimate the imaginative ability of scientists. Keeping a proper moral parameter around stem cell research may lead to amazing discoveries.
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