Recent innovations in stem cell research have caused an uproar in the both the scientific community and the field of bioethics.

Two teams, one from Kyoto University and one from the University of Wisconsin, published articles in Cell magazine and Science Magazine, respectively, that announced a breakthrough in stem cell research that allowed adult human skin cells to be reprogrammed as cells that have properties similar to those of embryonic stem cells.

“The position our people have taken is that it’s extremely important, that it’s extremely promising, but it’s far from ready for prime time,” said B.D. Colen, senior communications officer for university science at Harvard University.

He said that, even though the new cell form is derived from skin cells, it has all the properties of stem cells.

“There are various tests that they can do to compare them to embryonic stem cells, but you are presumably trying to get them to develop into every cell type that you would conceivably want,” Colen said.

He said one of the problems with the research was that two out of the four genes that had been used to trick the adult cells into changing promote cancer.

“So, until this is done without any of these cancer promoter genes, it is something that could be used as a research tool, but it’s not something that we could use for treatment,” Colen said.

He said that, additionally, there was a problem with the retroviruses that were used to get the genetic material into the test cells and that retroviruses have a habit of activating “cancer genes.”

He said it would be “jumping the gun” to abandon current embryonic stem cell research.

“The people here doing this work don’t believe that there is or are valid ethical reasons to do the research and believe that the objections to the research are not ethical, but they are religious,” he said. “The opposition [is] based on faith-based beliefs about when things like ensoulment occur – when a microscopic entity becomes a person – and arguments about a person aren’t ethical, they’re religious.”

He also said it was virtually impossible to get any type of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and that this new type of research could provide new funding.

“It’s probably going to be years before we really know all of the benefits and pitfalls of this research,” he said.

Chris Tuggle, professor of animal science, said the quest in this type of research was to find a totipotent cell, which he said was basically just a “fancy way of saying totally potent.”

This, he said, was the definition of a stem cell.

“It can create any kind of cell in the body,” Tuggle said.

However, he said, the only real way to prove these new stem cells were actually totipotent would be to create a human being.

“So we don’t have any proof that anything is totipotent. Whether you have that ultimate final proof is a question among humans,” Tuggle said.

According to a report titled “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells” that was published in Science Magazine by a team from the University of Wisconsin, “four factors are sufficient to reprogram human somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells that exhibit the essential characteristics of embryonic stem cells.”

The cells could be useful in the “production of new disease models” and the ability to develop new drugs and transplant medicines once the limitations of the technology have been resolved.

Tuggle said that the basic idea was that, instead of having to harvest totipotent stem cells from embryos, they could get them from adult skin cells instead.

These new cells may not be truly proven to be totipotent, he said, but they could be referred to as either pluripotent or multipotent. This, he said, means that stem cells can be induced to grow into other types of cells and that their progress can be measured.

“They are certainly pluripotent because they were able to show markers for different types of cells,” Tuggle said.

Another problem, Tuggle said, is that “people don’t like things that are transgenic or genetically modified.”

He said that, in some ways, the method is “less genetically natural” than other types of gene manipulation.