The Moral Frontiers of Stem Cell Research

by Matthew Hoberg
December 6, 2010

Though recent progress in induced pluripotent stem-cell research may reduce reliance on embryonic stem cells, it is no moral panacea.

Scientists have recently developed a safe and efficient method to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from adult skin cells. Many opponents of embryonic stem cell research hail this news as an important step away from research methods that rely on destroying embryos. Despite this advance, the future of iPS cell research involves challenging moral and legal issues.

The therapeutic promise of stem cell research rests on using pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown into many of the types of cells found in the human body. Until recently, such cells could be produced only by destroying human embryos and harvesting embryonic stem cells. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) sought a method of producing pluripotent cells without destroying embryos. Their goal was to show that adult cells, rather than embryos, could provide the raw material for stem-cell therapy.

In 2007, scientists demonstrated that they could transform human skin cells into iPS cells, bypassing the destruction of embryos. While opponents of ESCR hailed this announcement as a sign that iPS cells could provide the full therapeutic promise of ES cells, the methods were still in their infancy. It took about a month for the iPS cells to develop, and very few transformations were successful: 99.9% of treated cells failed to transform. Besides being slow and unreliable, the techniques were dangerous. Viruses were used to insert specific genes into the adult cells, which increased the cancer risk for the stem cells and thus for prospective patients receiving stem cell therapy. Without a safer technique, the promise of iPS cell research remained in the future.
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