Dang

Really, really disturbing news on the stem cell research front, folks. Two teams of scientists claim to have created human stem cells from skin cells, by "adding four genes." If this breakthrough becomes standardized, there will be no need to create and destroy human embryos to harvest stem cells.

This turn of events is disturbing because stem cell research had become the rhetorical silver bullet in the abortion debate. It turned tables on the pro-life crowd, allowing pro-choice advocates to advocate life -- of the handicapped or elderly. Meanwhile, those who tried to defend life as an absolute line beginning as conception were left trying to protect a lump of cells, as it were, allegedly against the existing lives of the born.

Embryonic stem cell research was a huge table turning for the abortion crowd, which for years had been on the defensive against ghastly images of aborted fetuses and brilliantly moving images of healthy fetuses clearly alive and human in the womb. The stem cell debate frustrated and split the pro-life coalition, as many a pro-life public official crossed the line in hopes of curing everything from Alzheimer's to autism. I'm very firmly pro-life myself, but found myself surprisingly conflicted on this one.

Now all those rhetorical gains may go up in a poof of research, if implications of this research are borne out and publicized:

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.

This will be frustrating to some, but I can live with it.