The moral controversy over stem cell research seemed to have been put to rest with the engineering of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which do not require the destruction of embryos. But news of the creation of cloned human embryonic stem cells (New Scientist, 8 October, p 6) sets the stage for renewed ethical debate. A research team at The New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory fused unfertilised human eggs with skin cells, effectively creating an embryo containing personalised stem cells for the donor of the skin cells -albeit stem cells of no clinical use because they have three sets of chromosomes rather than two.
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