The implications here are huge, from both a medicinal and ethical standpoint. In the past, other scientists experimented with cloning processes that avoided ethical quandaries like extracting fetal cells, but none of those were nearly as reliable as this one. And this approach might be able to work with adult skin cells—removing fetuses from the equation—but it’s still too early to tell.
And while the stem cells generated here definitely aren’t intended to be used to produce actual, living, human clones, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t be. And life potential like that is bound to raise all sorts of questions.
via A Human Stem Cell Has Been Cloned For the First Time.