Re:The science! (Score 1)

I wonder, if we hadn't been objecting, would anybody have attempted to find this alternative, or would researchers have considered the embryonic method good enough?

I'm a grad. student at UW-Madison, where Prof. Thompson works. While I don't personally work with human embryonic stem cells (hESC), I know several people who do. I can tell you that the motivation for this work was not people's objections to the "moral dilemma" of hESCs. If you recall, this is the same Prof. that first demonstrated that you can keep hESCs in their undifferentiated state. Since UW was the first place to do that, they have many of the hESC lines that people are allowed to work with. In other words, these people already had access to all the hESCs they need for any research they wanted to do with hESCs. This work was mostly motivated by scientific interest, and once hESC therapies become available in the distant future, this will also help with genetic matching, as you said.

People will continue to work with hESCs for quite a while, I guarantee you. They still have not figured out how to undo the genetic changes they had to make to "coerce" the skin cells back into stem cells. I also fail to see how adding several steps to the process of deriving tissue from hESCs is going to make it any cheaper...