I agree completely with your reasoning here! It is a good thing to try these experiments with higher mammals, but not humans. What these marvels of nascent life may indeed discover are the processes which will allow them to grow organs and useful tissues (not organisms, organs) using the stem cells that exist in all of us! THAT would be medical miracle worth the work and a true boon to humankind (and, perhaps, all of life on earth!). Believe it or not (and you are probably even more aware of this than I), there are scientists working on these very aspects, and there may even be ways of (I think you may have already mentioned this, or Skywalk did) conceiving just the stem cell precursors to say a kidney and implanting that in a higher mammal for development into a usable organ, to be transferred from the animal to the human somatic cell donor!
But that's why parthenogenesis is important, and - setting aside the morality of it for a moment - why researchers were interested in fetal stem cells in the first place - because it's important to understand the process of cell and tissue differentiation, and how generic cells morph into specialized forms. Adult stem cells have already undergone that differentiation, so you have to try to force them to generalize again, to see if you can force them to specialize in other directions than what they already are. But if you do that, you can't be sure that you're duplicating the natural process of differentiation unless you've
studied the natural process of differentiation in the very early stages of development. And that's where parthenotes could prove important and worthwhile - you get the advantage of studying cells that are effectively equivalent to fetal stem cells, but you also have the advantage of not actually
requiring a fetus to do so.
Yes, ideally the point is to someday take a swab of cells from the inside of your cheek and use the DNA to grow you a brand-new kidney, or whatever organ you might need, without requiring a full-blown clone that you strip for parts, but you can't do things like that unless you understand how to take some random specialized adult cell, force it into regressing back to the developmental point where organs and tissues are differentiating, and then guide it into growing into one single organ - and there's no way to do that unless you really understand how specialized cells and tissues and structures and organs come about from generic stem cells. And the only way to do that is to understand how the process takes place in the fetus. But now maybe we can learn those things without actually using fetuses, which is why I don't quite understand the resistance to the prospect of parthenogenesis - it seems to me to be an excellent middle ground.
Too bad Askel's not around any more - I'd truly be interested to hear her take, although I can guess what it would be ;)