The Embryonic Stem Cell Debate Is Over

With the recent development of a way of transforming adult skin cells into stem cells, the push to continue working on embryonic stem cells took a potentially fatal blow.  Now, two new announcements have driven nails into the coffin.

First, researchers in Japan have discovered a way to create stem cells from wisdom teeth:

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.

"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."

The announcement follows the groundbreaking discovery by US and Japanese scientists last year that they could produce stem cells from skin, a finding that was hailed by the Vatican and US President George W. Bush.

Then, as a result of that research, we now have this from from Harvard:

A team at Harvard has succeeded in directly reprogramming one type of adult cell into another, without even the need for the intermediary step of reprogramming to a pseudo-embryonic state and only then differentiating to a new developed cell type. In other words, not only do they not need embryos, they don't even need stem cells at all; they can just turn one type of cell into another directly. What's more, they've done this inside a living animal (a mouse), and not just in a laboratory dish.

This duo is essentially a fatal blow to embryonic stem cell supporters.  Scientifically speaking, there is absolutely no reason now to utilize embryonic stem cells.  Not only can stem cells be generated without embryos, but they can be generated more quickly, easily, and cheaply, and we can stock them for future research.  As President Bush said, science and ethics are not mutually exclusive, and his philosophy has been proven right in dramatic fashion.

Embryonic stem cell research needs to end immediately.  Anyone who continues it (or proposes continuing it) has some serious questions to answer regarding their motivation.

There's my two cents.