Yes, this year will surely go down in history as probably the most significant year for stem cell research (so far) – and it had nothing to do with creating or destroying human embryos. From Discovery News:

Dec. 26, 2007 — It was the kind of breakthrough scientists had dreamed of for decades and its promise to help cure disease appears to be fast on the way to being realized.

Researchers in November announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.

Then just earlier this month a different team announced it had cured sickle cell anemia in mice using stem cells derived from adult mouse skin…

The new technique, while far from perfected, is so promising that the man who managed to clone the world’s first sheep, Dolly, is giving up his work cloning embryos to focus on studying stem cells derived from skin cells.

“The fact that (the) introduction of a small number of proteins into adult human cells could produce cells that are equivalent to embryo stem cells takes us into an entirely new era of stem cell biology,” said Ian Wilmut, the Scottish researcher who first created a viable clone by transferring a cell nucleus into a new embryo.

One of the greatest advantages of the new technique is its simplicity: it takes just four genes to turn the skin cell back into a stem cell.

This, unlike the complex and expensive process developed by Wilmut, can be done in a standard biological lab. And skin cells are much easier to harvest than embryos.

“It’s an explosion of resources,” said Konrad Hochedlinger, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

This is not a perfect system, to be sure. More research is needed for this method to be available for patients, but there’s no doubt that this discovery will have a major impact on the future of stem cell research.