It's preliminary work and definitely at the R&D stage, but it is progress. From the article: "Dr. George Daley and his colleagues at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute used ordinary skin cells and bone marrow from people with a variety of diseases, including Parkinson's, Huntington's and Down syndrome to produce the stem cells. 'I think we'll see in years ahead that this opens the door to a new way to treating degenerative diseases,'he said.. The new technique reprograms cells, giving them the chameleon-like qualities of embryonic stem cells, which can morph into all kinds of tissue, such as heart, nerve and brain. As with embryonic stem cells, the hope is to speed medical research."