A Japanese team of scientists at Kyoto university have outflanked the entire therapeutic cloning research community to create a new line of stem cells by reverting ordinary skin cells.

This is mainstream research, not an eccentric theory from a Romanian naturopathy journal. Yamanaka's work has been confirmed by two other teams affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles -- both of them headed by ardent supporters of embryonic stem cell research.

They say that the reprogrammed cells meet all the tests of pluripotent cells -- they form colonies, propagate continuously and form cancerous growths called teratomas, as well as producing chimaeras. "Its unbelievable, just amazing," says Hans Schöler, a German stem cell expert. "For me, it's like Dolly. It's that type of an accomplishment."

What Yamanaka did was to take a mouse skin cell and introduce into it four proteins which trigger the expression of other genes to make it pluripotent. "It's easy. There's no trick, no magic," he says. Now the race is on to apply the technique to human cells. "We are working very hard -- day and night," says Yamanaka.

Even the Australian doyen of therapeutic cloning, Alan Trounson, of Monash University, is enthusiastic. "It would change the way we see things quite dramatically," he says. He plans to start experiments "tomorrow".

Great news right? Not so much.

With an ethical solution looking quite plausible, the pressure will be on scientists to explain why therapeutic cloning deserves to be legalised and funded. Two years ago, Dr Janet D. Rowley, an Australian working in the US who is an implacable foe of the Bush Administration's policy, dismissed ethical solutions like Yamanaka's. "We have extremely limited research dollars, and to use them to study these alternatives is wrong," she declared. "That money should be available for actual research." But now stem cells derived from embryos are starting to look like dead-end "alternatives."

Don't expect supporters of embryonic stem cell research to respond rationally, not in the short term, at least. The other day, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel told the US House of Representatives as he voted to overturn the Bush policy: "It is ironic that every time we vote on this legislation, all of a sudden there is a major scientific discovery that basically says, 'You don't have to do [embryonic] stem cell research.'

There is good reason why Rahm Emmanuel is quoted here--the Democrats have embraced embryonic stem cell research as a political two-fer: A chance to transform the killing of unborn children into a social "good" and an opportunity to characterize opposition to abortion as religiously-motivated superstition. Unfortunately, the Democrats make the same mistake they always do--they try to pick winners according to their ideological inclinations, which of course carries with it the strong implication that they don't give a damn about people suffering from Parkinson's and other diseases that would benefit from a successful therapeutic cloning technology.

Scientists with careers and research funds on the line can't be too happy either. They solved the dearth of private research capital by making a deal with political interests, but ultimately they simply chose the wrong research model. The smart ones are already doing experiments with the new methodology and will go with what works, but some will undoubtedly keep following the embryonic path until they run out of road.

The cat's out of the bag at this point--the media is picking up the story because of the public interest in the progress of therapeutic cloning. Its unlikely that Democrats can engage in the kind of distortion they did during last year's election. The real problem will be for the states that have already passed legislation devoting large chunks of taxpayer money to embryonic stem cell research--how to explain?

There is of course, the embarrassment that political considerations have caused the United States to fall behind in this promising new medical field. When are we going to learn to stop trying to pick winners?

Apparently not anytime soon--have you seen the energy bill?