Ethical Dilemma looms

Going to be fun to watch the fundies wax wroth while those who sold their souls for their votes try to finesse it:

Mice with severe spinal cord injuries regained much of their ability to walk normally after getting injections of stem cells taken from the brains of human fetuses, scientists in California reported yesterday.

...

The new research, described in the Sept. 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked mice injected with a kind of human stem cells called neurospheres. They are the laboratory-grown progeny of human cells retrieved from the brains of 16- to 18-week aborted fetuses.

Nine days after getting identical spinal cord injuries, each animal received about 75,000 neurospheres in four injections around the injury.

Within a day, the team reported, the cells began to migrate into the injured spinal cord. After 16 weeks, the mice were given tests of agility and leg coordination, and compared with two other groups. Mice that had received the stem cells scored significantly better than similarly injured mice that had not -- and also better than those injected with ordinary skin cells, a test to see whether just any kind of cellular injection might trigger healing. Researchers who scored the tests did not know which mice had received the injections.

Full story here.