From “The Troubled Hunt for the Final Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards got for probably the most intriguing, controversial, underfunded and hush-hush of scientific pursuits, the seek for the human embryonic stem (ES) cell would doubtless sweep the classes. It’s a hunt for the tabula rasa of human cells—a cell that has the potential to present rise to any of the myriad of cell sorts discovered within the physique. If this mysterious creature might be captured and grown within the lab, it’d change the face of drugs, promising, amongst different exceptional choices, the flexibility to develop alternative human tissue at will … [but] these cells are discovered solely in embryos or very immature fetuses, and pro-life forces have focused the researchers who’re attempting to find ES cells, hoping to cease their science chilly. As well as, the federal authorities has barred federal {dollars} for human embryo analysis, pushing it out of the mainstream of developmental biology. To make issues worse, human ES cells might conceivably present a car for the genetic engineering of individuals, and the moral dilemmas surrounding human cloning threaten to spill over onto this discipline.”
Replace from the writer (2023): The controversy lasted years, however science prevailed over faith within the stem-cell wars of the early 2000s. Now analysis on ES cells is paid for by the US authorities. But biology retains providing surprises. The newest? Analysis reveals stem cells within the lab can self-assemble again into “artificial” embryos, shockingly just like the true factor. And that’s the following debate.
