A very nice BBC article on a group that plans to put the tooth implant boys out of business by 2009 using stem cells to grow new teeth. Only one thing wrong with the whole article, it makes no differentiation between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. After a few seconds of digging at the company website it becomes clear that these are adult cells that avoid all the nasty moral problems that embryonic stem cells raise. You can get these stem cells with just a bit of liposuction from your own body.
There's nothing morally objectionable about that but I bet you that 9/10ths of the readership won't make the differentiation because they aren't told in the article. They'll likely, and wrongly, associate embryonic stem cells with the advance and view it as just one more bit of evidence that the moralist types are holding back progress. In fact, adult stem cells seem to be much more promising for actual therapies, rather than grant applications for theoretical treatments that all too often seem to go wrong.
Posted by TMLutas at May 3, 2004 09:53 PM