MASSACHUSETTS (voa) – Researchers say they have found a new way to make stem cells, basic cells that could revolutionize treatment of injury and disease.
Friday’s issue of the journal, Science, says a laboratory in the northeastern U.S. state of Massachusetts used chemicals to stimulate the growth of unfertilized eggs of monkeys. The resulting embryos produced stem cells that grew into heart, muscle and brain cells.
Scientists say that if they can get the same results with human eggs, the process may offer an alternative to cloning human stem cells.
Use of human stem cells is controversial because extracting cells from an embryo destroys it, an act some regard as taking a life. Researchers say taking stem cells from unfertilized embryos would avoid the problem, because those embryos could not develop into a being.
Scientists say the new process is still in an early development stage. Out of 77 monkey eggs (at Advanced Cell Technology labs in Massachusetts) only four developed useful embryos, and of those, only one set of usable stem cells was produced.
The technique has worked on mice as well as primates. But some scientists say that with humans, the resulting tissues would only benefit women of reproductive age.
President George Bush and some members of the U.S. Congress are against human cloning. The House of Representatives has already passed a bill to ban human cloning of all kinds, and the Senate is expected to take up the measure later this year.
