In the wake of the stunning announcement by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Thomson that he and his team had succeeded in reprogramming human skin cells to create new stem cell lines, many people have begun to speculate on the effect that this breakthrough will have on the stem cell debate.
Advertisement
As the parent of a child with diabetes, it is my hope that Thomson’s breakthrough will allow our nation to move forward with a national policy that increases public funding of all forms of stem cell research. I would like to believe that we will see an end to the contentious debate over this research that has caused years of delay and that too often has left researchers without adequate resources.
I am not optimistic, however.