By Dave Andrusko

The story which ran on BBC.com starts out with three encouraging sentences: "An Oxford University team will use adult stem cells, which have the ability to become any cell in the human body--to examine the neurological condition. Skin cells will be used to grow the brain neurons that die in Parkinson's, a conference will hear. The research will not involve the destruction of human embryos" (emphasis added).

By way of preface, the BBC uses "adult stem cells" in a slightly different manner than is customarily the case. In the story they are talking about the creation of what is known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) which are typically formed by emptying a skin cell of its DNA and adding some genes to a normal cell. "Adult stem cells" usually refer to stem cells that already exist in body tissues, such as bone marrow.

Having said that, I asked David Prentice, who has followed the stem cell discussion as closely as anyone, for his comments.

"It's encouraging to see this example in the U.K., a country that never met an embryo experiment it didn't like, to turn away from life-destroying experiments to ethical science. Note that this announcement is simply the proposal to do the experiment--this is not an actual clinical trial, not even a story covering results from lab experiments.

"According to the BBC, the UK scientists propose to create induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from a large number of Parkinson's patients, and compare those cells in the lab with iPS cells made from healthy volunteers. The iPS cells are made by taking a small sample of skin or blood, and adding a few genes. This "reprograms" the normal cells so that they behave just like embryonic stem cells, but there are no embryos, eggs, or cloning involved. The cells can thus be derived ethically, without harming any human.

"The UK scientists propose to study development of the brain cells that are damaged in Parkinson's disease, comparing the cells from patients against healthy cells in the hopes that they can determine clues in the lab about the disease."