From the Guardian:

In a breakthrough that could have huge implications, British and Canadian scientists have found a way of reprogramming skin cells taken from adults, effectively winding the clock back on the cells until they were in an embryonic form.

The work has been hailed as a major step forward by scientists and welcomed by pro-life organisations, who called on researchers to halt other experiments which use stem cells collected from embryos made at IVF clinics.

To my mind, this raises an interesting question.  To what extent has ethically grounded resistance to stem cell research contributed to scientists working on solutions that not only represent progress in terms of the technology, but also in terms of the ethical questions involved?

Full disclosure: I'm pretty solidly pro-stem cell research.  I don't think that we should be harvesting embryos for this purpose, but I don't think anyone is really advocating that anyhow.  For me, the ethical dilemma of utilizing the cellular material of embryos that will not and cannot be born is negligible.  For others, not so much.

I want to be clear: I'm not arguing that ethical opposition to stem cell research is what has made this sort of breakthrough possible.  There's just no way to know with certainty how much political pressures have influenced this research, if at all.  Even so, I think it's interesting to ponder whether those pressures, while possibly delaying the delivery of actual stem cell-based cures, may have influenced the time frame in which solutions that are superior, both ethically and medically, are available in the long term.