No, they’re not going to implant it. They want to cultivate embryonic stem cells for study but they don’t want to waste human eggs on the project. Recipe: Take one cow’s egg, clean out its DNA, and insert human DNA instead. 99% man, 1% cow. Result: Awesome. Why is this necessary when they’ve already figured out how to turn adult human skin cells into embryonic stem cells? Good question. Thoroughness, it seems:

Experts are pursuing various ways to create stem cells. Several teams said last year they had re-programmed ordinary skin cells to act like human embryonic stem cells, but stressed that many different approaches need to continue before anyone fully understands how to regenerate human tissue and organs.

We had the big Hot Air stem-cell battle royal back before the mid-term elections, after Jim “The Passion of the Christ” Caviezel replied to Michael J. Fox’s ad for Claire McCaskill with a flourish of Aramaic. The issue turns, more or less, on whether you believe in ensoulment; if yes then you’re probably a flat no on the research and if no then you’re probably a qualified yes, limited by your own metric of when the embryo is sufficiently person-like that killing it crosses a line. My own line is drawn at whenever, per best scientific estimates, it’s conscious or able to feel pain. There’s no way to be sure, of course, but then there’s rarely any absolute way to be sure that an executed felon was guilty of the murder with which he was charged and yet most conservatives are okay with killing him. There are slippery slope issues too, but then that’s also the left’s argument vis-a-vis “torture” and conservatives don’t have much patience for that either. So let’s try a poll — admittedly an imperfect one — just to see how close HA hews to the standard “never, ever” right-wing position. Vote your (lack of) conscience!