stem cells ethical issues

as you all know, stem cells is a big buzzwordright now in the news and the media. everybody's talking about how we can cure diseases withstem cells. notre dame has taken the very strong and visionary approach that we needto be a recognized leader in this area, otherwise human embryonic stem cell research, it isarguable whether it has as much promise as adult stem cells or not, is the one that everybodyis pushing in the media. for a variety of social, moral, theological, ethical reasons,as well as scientific reasons, there needs to be a push in using other sources of stemcells, in particular adult stem cells that reside in all of your bodies and a relativelynew type of cell called a induced plorypotent stem cell or ips cell, which can be generatedfrom anybody and has some of the same properties

as embryonic stem cells but we do not haveto kill an actual individual to isolate those cells. the idea is that we can take cellsfrom an individual, express four specific genes in those cells and in doing so we makethose cells now become ips cells. those ips cells are basically like an embryonic cell.they can become any cell in the body. the advantage of these cells is that we do destroya human being to isolate them and second, we can take those cells from an individualwho suffers from a particular disease, such as niemann pick type c, generate ips cellsfrom that individual and then be able to convert those ips cells into neurons, muscles, whateverwe want. we can potentially test drugs on niemann pick cells as opposed to testing drugson cells that we have engineered that are

kind of niemann pick-like.