stem cells without destroying life-- part 2

Now this on using embryonic stem cells, but without destroying them-- from the Washington Post's Rick Weiss (hat tip: C-J)...

Scientists in Massachusetts said yesterday that they had created several colonies of human embryonic stem cells without harming the embryos from which they were derived, the latest in a series of advances that could speed development of stem-cell-based treatments for a variety of diseases.

In June, scientists in Japan and Wisconsin said they had made cells very similar to embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells, without involving embryos. But that technique so far requires the use of gene-altered viruses that contaminate the cells and limit their biomedical potential. By contrast, the new work shows for the first time that healthy, normal embryonic stem cells can be cultivated directly from embryos without destroying them....

Actually, they're not positive that they didn't harm the embryos-- and it's not (ethically) testable...

The embryos Lanza used, which were donated for research, appear not to have been damaged, Landis acknowledged. However, she said, "it is impossible to know definitively" that the embryos were not in some subtle way harmed by the experiment....

Landis said the only way to prove that the technique does not harm embryos would be to transfer many of them to women's wombs and see whether the resulting babies were normal. But it would be unethical to do that experiment, she said, so the question cannot be answered.
That standard has Lanza fuming. By all scientifically recognized measures, he said, the embryos -- currently frozen in suspended animation because they were donated for research and not to make babies -- are normal, he said....

The new technique involves carefully removing a single cell from a newly formed eight-cell embryo and coaxing that cell to divide repeatedly until it forms a self-replenishing colony of embryonic stem cells.

Fertility doctors perform such "single cell biopsies" thousands of times every year to test the genetic health of embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization, with little or no apparent effect on the remaining seven cells' ability to develop into a normal baby. The idea is to check the removed cell for DNA defects and transfer to the woman's womb only embryos whose cells test normal....