Stem Cells: A Status Report (Essays‪)‬

Last October, during one of those periodic flurries f news that push the Stem Cell Wars back onto he front pages for a day or two, the telephone in the Harvard Medical School office of Dr. George Q. Daley kept ringing off the hook. On one occasion, it was a reporter seeking Daley's assessment of a new technique for creating embryonic stem cells that had just been reported in the online edition of the journal Nature. Researchers in the laboratory of Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had managed to clone a deliberately crippled mouse embryo, with the idea that if a genetically manipulated embryo lacked the ability to form a placenta and attach to the uterus, it would therefore lack the biological potential to become a mature creature. If the same trick worked with human embryos, Daley was asked, would this solve the ethical dilemma? He wasn't so sure. "The embryo that is established in the first few days," he pointed out, "is substantially normal."