Ah.... what am I getting at? It becomes hard to draw a line between a human zygote and a zygote deliberately damaged or altered to be so abnormal that we call it something else.
The more permutations and combinations they make of different nuclear, cytoplasmic, and mitochondrial materials, the more the distinction between a human being, an animal, and a gobbet of lab material is blown to smithereens.
One would think somebody would see that in itself as an ethical problem.
I have a problem with all of the above. I don’t believe that this should be happening at all.
However, the method of obtaining the stem cells from the article does not use an egg, and therefore there is no embryo created. The stem cells are obtained from skin cells (I think) and their DNA is reprogrammed to allow them to become any other kind of cell. There is no damaging or altering of a human zygote, only the changing of the DNA structure of an existing cell, to create a line of stem cells.
There is much work to be done, but this gives scientists an avenue to pursue another type of research, without harming embryos. I think it is excellent news.