Revised: How to Harvest Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul

I need to repost this in order to update it with some information. I have been reading about this ever since I posted it and I now have to say that the Wired story contains a factual error. The story reports that Dr. Hurlbut is in favor of "altering cloned embryos" in order to harvest embryonic stem cells and this is incorrect. The process he does advocate is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, and the difference is explained in this entry found at the website of the American Association of Medical Colleges. The difference is that in SCNT you alter an unfertilized egg, NOT an embryo, and Hurlbut is proposing to use this process to produce an artificial teratoma, a sub-organism that contains embryonic stem cells. A teratoma is a naturally occuring tumor that will sometimes grow from an egg or sperm cell. The story is pretty good otherwise, but this factual error is huge... very huge, as anyone knows who has been following the debate over the ethical implications of such research.

According to the story "How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul" in the June Issue of Wired, Stanford scientist William Hurlbut has found a way to harvest embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Here is an excerpt:

William Hurlbut clicks his laptop, and an x-ray pops up on the projection screen behind him. It's a picture of a tumor in a woman's ovary - a ghostly blob floating near the spine. In the middle are several strange, Chiclet-shaped nodules. "Those white opacities," Hurlbut says, "are actually fully formed teeth."

A few audience members blanch. Though we're in an ordinary conference room in Rome, it feels like church. The seats are filled with some of the Vatican's top thinkers, including a dozen men in clerical dress, a nun in a flowing brown habit, and a Dominican priest whose prayer beads quietly clatter. Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford, has traveled here to tell them about a new way to create human embryonic stem cells.

I'm not sure that the solution is one that "even the Vatican will love", but at least this shows there are some scientists out there trying to find an ethical solution to it all... which seems to me to be a good thing. I do think, however, that what he is proposing is morally acceptable.