The press release announcing the new A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies also notes that they are planning on creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines.
In addition to deriving new embryonic stem cell lines, researchers will use recently developed techniques to convert adult skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells. These reprogrammed cells display the most scientifically valuable properties of embryonic stem cells, while enabling researchers to bypass embryos altogether.
So if iPS cells have the same properties as embryonic stem cells and don’t require the destruction of human embryos why are University of Michigan researchers so giddy about killing human embryos?
