Research at the Universities of Toronto, Canada, and Edinburgh, Scotland, hold the promise that doctors will be able to obtain stem cells from skin cells to cure disease. This would eliminate the need for the use of embryonic stem cells, which introduce health risks and have ethical problems.

Embryonic Stem Cells

When human cells are produced at conception and begin to divide, they contain all the genes necessary for any cell in the body: hence, they are stem cells. As they further divide, some of the genes are shut down or disabled, so that the cells eventually develop into cells that perform only the functions of different parts of the body. This process is called differentiation.

Embryonic cells from the excess embryos after in-vitro fertilization are at the early stages of differentiation, so can be made to grow into any type of cell. However, there are problems with embryonic cells: