This will fuel calls to reject embryo research which, after a decade of work – has failed to produce any treatments.

In this latest advance, scientists at Harvard Medical School used cells from the skin of adults suffering from diseases to produce stem cells that act like those taken from embryos.

Stem cells are the body’s ‘master’ cells, which can be grown into various kinds of body tissues. Scientists hope to use them to repair damaged tissues.

This latest breakthrough will allow researchers to gain insights into the cause of illnesses including Type 1 diabetes, Down’s syndrome and Huntington’s disease.

Researchers hope that by ‘rewinding’ the stem cells from patients with diseases to this embryonic-like state they will be able to learn more about the way the diseases develop.

Scientists around the world are increasingly moving towards non-embryonic stem cell research.

Verified accomplishments of adult (non-embryonic) stem cell research from sources such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood are already providing hope and therapy for patients suffering from heart muscle injury, diabetes and brain damage from stroke and at least 72 conditions — with realistic promise for treating other diseases on the horizon.

Breakthroughs, like this one from Harvard, have led a number of scientists to move away from embryonic stem cell research.

The scientist behind the Harvard work, Willy Lensch, said: “This will help us understand the environmental causes that push these undefined cells to become diseases.
We can look at what is happening to the hormones, the genes, the growth factors, and compare that to cells that don’t have the mutations – learn new things.”

Scientists also at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease by using adult blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.

But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.

In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”

So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There’s no middleman . . . and there’s no drug company that’s going to get rich as a result of it.”

But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.

John G. Berg