"...enabling same-sex couples to have their own genetic offspring."

A must read article from Nature...

New Sources of Sex Cells

A little background for those who might need it - so, some scientists set out to determine the differences between pluripotent cells (stem cells, a.k.a. cool cells that can differentiate into any type of tissue) and differentiated cells (like a skin cell). Turns out that if you transfect (insert genes via a virus) 4 specific genes into a differentiated cell you can "induce pluripotency" to form an induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell. In other words, you can make what looks and acts like a stem cell from almost any cell... woah. They did this in 2006 with mice cells and then again in 2007 with human cells.

Two important notes -

1. Though iPS cells have a gene expression profile that is very similar to embryonic stem cells, they are NOT exactly the same. So, there is some concern that these cells might not differentiate in an expected manner, or may become cancerous (freaky mutant petri dish babies!!!!!), and so on.

2. The current method of gene introduction, transfection, is known to cause some problems (this is why they stopped gene therapy experiments). The problem is achieving site-specific integration of those 4 special genes. If one of those genes happens to, say, integrate into a tumor suppressor gene, thus knocking out that gene, voila! you have a potentially cancerous cell. hmmm... problems. Well, needless to say, scientists have been working on developing new techniques of gene introduction (some completely new and some just special forms of transfection) and I have been told by one of my professors that "the near future looks promising."

So, obviously there are some interesting ethical discussions to be had... Perhaps another time. I need to get some sleep.

[Important note: I am not an expert on this field. In fact, I haven't even finished my B.S., so if I have any details wrong, which is probably the case, please feel free to enlighten me.]