too good?

Stupid blogger - I had this one written this morning, then got too busy at the lab to remember to try and publish...

I heard about this on the news radio coming home, but was too tired to care at that point. But supposedly we can create stem cell lines without embryo destruction.

I'm not a stem cell researcher. I don't know the nuances of how to make these things work. But I'm highly skeptical. As others pointed out, the embryos used as "donors" for these lines actually were not allowed to be implanted and develop into a baby. However, that was successfully done in mice.

I understand the ethical issues of why the "gold standard" to their claim wasn't done. But mice are not people in a smaller size, no matter how many human genes you put in them.

My guess is that the rate of spontaneous abortion would be higher in these embryos than standard IVF embryos.

But the idea got me thinking about a different approach (though brings up just as many ethical issues). If we understood the cause of identical twins, we could artificially create identical twins, and use those for stem cell lines. This has problems, I know, since identical twins are not the same person.

I wonder if we have the beginnings of a new stem cell scandal in the works. We'll see what happens over the next few months.