ABSTRACT
Towards the end of November 2007, just a few weeks after the announcement that the Nobel prize in Medicine for 2007 would go to three pioneers in stem cell research, two research groups reported independently. They had cracked a major problem on the path towards the holy grail of stem cell research, a method to reprogramme somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells. The research groups both used a technique where four genes known to be active in embryonic stem cells were introduced in somatic cells by retroviruses and overexpressed. The discoveries are, however, of ethical significance to anyone who believes that human Embryonic Stem Cells research needs more than minimal justification in terms of its likely outcome. The efficiency of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer for stem cell derivation is 0.7% in Macaques, the only primate where the technique has currently been shown to work, thereby requiring the use of more than 140 oocytes per stem cell line.
