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good question - the headline of the article would lead one to believe that these cells do what the misplaced, teratoma-to-be cell does - divides and starts down the path of becoming an actual embryo - from which one could then theoretically extract stem cells...hmmmm.... when i first read about teratomas, i thought there must be something we can use here... and if you think about it, the germ cell that begets the teratoma - as far as i know, there is nothing wrong with it internally - it just somehow shows up in the wrong place - it goes bad because it is getting the wrong external cues (they have confirmed this i believe by taking teratoma cells and putting them back into the right environment and i think some sizeable percentage revert to normalcy - this is all from memory though so apologies if this is inaccurate.) soooo theoretically speaking, if this cell gets far enough along to become a blastocyst (the point at which stem cells could be extracted - at about the five day mark) then stem cells, normal ones because there is nothing wrong with the cell itself, could be extracted before the thing goes into chaos mode. there are problems with this, of course - one is, unless we were able to find these errant cells in humans within a few days of them going astray (which would be god''s will, i would think), the only way to obtain stem cells from them would be to intentionally take germ cells and coax them into becoming embryos (which would not be god's will, i would think) which would then make the germ cells eligible for sacredness because each would have the potential of becoming a fully formed human... and there we are, right back at this comment of ray's and her comment about the spilling of seed. anyway my point was there is an embryo/fetus in the headline but the article makes it sound like testicle cells turn directly into embryonic stem cells (which would much more accurately be termed pluripotent cells, if they did, in fact, not come from an embryo.) just rambling. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn