While we don’t understand all the scientific technology involved, it has recently come to Gear Live’s attention that it is now possible to create stem cells without the use of a female egg. Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem-cell biologist at Boston’s Whitehead Institute, Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka, and other scientists have said that if they take a mouse skin cell and switch on four certain genes, they can come up with a new cell.

“When we analyzed them, they were indistinguishable from normal embryonic stem cells,” Jaenisch said. Perhaps in time this ongoing research can put an end to stem cell research’s moral controversy.