CELL*WISE

I don't have time to go into all the details and give much of my own opinion right now. I may possibly write a follow-up post.
For now, some quality links of the most popular stem cell news currently.

"From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path" Wired Science from Wired.com
In this article, you can click on a link (the first November 2007 link in the "timeline") to actually get the full scientific paper (PDF) from the Yamanaka lab group (Japan) titled "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors" published in Cell. Even I'm still waiting on getting the full paper from the Thomson lab group (Wisconsin) titled "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells" published just yesterday online in Science, because most people need a subscription of some sort.

Additional current articles from Wired.com:

"Why You Should Believe the Latest Stem Cells Breakthroughs"

"Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead into Gold'"

Other current news articles:

"Embryonic Stem Cells without embryos - they're here" VentureBeat (Life Sciences category)

"Skin Cells Can Become Embryonic Stem Cells" from NPR (where you can listen to an 8-minute audio of the news if that's more convenient for you)

"New Method Equalizes Stem Cell Debate" from NY Times (if you're into more of the political
viewpoint / impact)

Fellow bloggers are starting to write...and there will be many many more:

"Middle Ground For Stem Cells?" from Hope for Pandora

"Induced Pluripotent Cells from Adult Skin" from Fresh Brainz

"The Next Stage in the Stem Cell Debate Begins!" from Framing Science

This may be the beginning of the end of the controversy, but it is still just the beginning for these scientific methods. As with most anything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It will probably still take many years for improvement and before any of these techniques can be used clinically. The important (hyphenated) keyword right now is "embryonic stem cell-like".