A more innocent stem cell line

Japanese Researchers at Kyoto University recently announced progress in creating stem cells from adult somatic cells. Stem cells are the earliest types of cells in our bodies and they are valuable to researchers because they have the ability to become different kinds of cells. A liver cell when it reproduces will always produce another liver cell, but a stem cell can produce a liver cell, or a skin cell, or a neuron. Because stem cells are precursors to other kinds of cells, they disappear in the body in very early stages of gestation, so to get new stem cells, they must be harvested from fetuses. That's where the ethics of stem cell research comes in.

But if the researchers are able to convert mature cells back into stem cells, this harvesting will not be necessary and the restrictions that limit harvesting will no longer continue to have an effect on how researchers can obtain and work with stem cells.

Why am I interested in this? Well, in part because a shift in the issues around stem cell research will likely occur if there is no longer an ethical debate about the source of stem cells.

But stem cell researchers who are enthusiastic about the whole field propose that stem cells will have wide application within medicine, including radical rearrangements of our original cellular composition by reprogramming cells to improve them. That would then shift the debate about stem cell research squarely into the question of how much modification a human body can undergo without losing its claim to that identity. And that's one of the questions posed by the technologies that I'm writing about.

It will be interesting to see if this development turns out to be as good as it sounds, or if it's like cold fusion and other 'developments' that have turned out to be disappointing after the hype. But if it does turn out to be replicable, then I'll be interested to see if it shifts the debate surrounding stem cell research the way I think it will.