Stem cells cells that won't destroy embryo?

Several states, including California, New Jersey and Illinois, have set up ways to fund the research. A number of Democratic candidates in this year’s congressional elections are focusing on the issue.

The research at Advanced Cell Technology subverts those efforts, McGee said. But writing in Nature earlier this year about the demonstration of the technique in mice, Stanford University stem cell researcher Irving Weissman disagreed.

“Although the efforts cited here will be criticized as a diversion of good science by politics, I believe all of these attempts to advance and translate medical science should be pursued in parallel,” Weissman wrote.

Scientists at Advanced Cell, based in Alameda, Calif., devised a clever means of piggybacking on existing fertility treatments to avoid the creation, manipulation or destruction of embryos specifically for the production of stem cells. The fertility procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is used when parents want to avoid having a child with a lethal or severely debilitating birth defect. About 1,000 such procedures are performed each year in the United States.

PGD begins with in vitro fertilization to produce numerous embryos. At a very early stage of development, when the embryos are no more than a ball of eight to 10 cells, a technician extracts a single cell from each one. The extracted cells are tested for genetic disorders, and those free of defect are then implanted in the mother in the hope they will develop.

The new stem cell production method takes a cell extracted during PGD and allows it to divide. One of the two resulting cells is genetically tested as in normal PGD; the other is cultured to encourage the development of stem cells.

“It’s nothing revolutionary,” said Yury Verlinsky, a Chicago geneticist who specializes in PGD.

Though the new procedure may satisfy the president’s objections to stem cell research, it does not meet the ethical standards of the Roman Catholic church, which opposes both PGD and in vitro fertilization.

Advanced Cell Technology was able to produce two viable stem cell lines from a total of 16 embryos. The lines appeared to exhibit the full potential of embryonic stem cells to develop into any type of human tissue, the researchers reported, but additional study is needed to verify that.

“I think this will become a standard way of producing stem cell lines,” said Ronald M. Green, a Dartmouth College professor of religion who is an unpaid bioethics adviser to Advanced Cell Technology.

The company, which has been struggling financially, owns about 300 patents that it hopes to develop into medical treatments. After news of its announcement broke on Wednesday, the price of its over-the-counter stock shot up from 42 cents to close at $1.83 per share.

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