Spending the money and scientific talent to perfect human cloning (SCNT) is becoming very hard to justify—if that is, all that is wanted are tailor made, patient specific stem cells for study of diseases and/or eventual therapeutic purposes. (Of course, therapeutic cloning is not the real goal, it is the pretext.) From the story: Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.
President Bush said he had confidence that scientists would be able to find ethical means of obtaining pluripotent stem cells. He was right.
“This is significant in two ways,” team leader Hajime Ogushi told AFP. “One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway.
“Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it’s easy for us to stock this source of stem cells.”
UPDATE: Mea culpa. This appears to have been another IPSC experiment. The teeth do not appear to have had pluripotent cells within them without injection of genes. Good catch by Lydia.
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