I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that goes is a policy matter and it's for civilian leadership to decide.

Researchers won't like being compared to the military but it's a lot like that; there is a job to do, a mission to accomplish, and the scope and limitations of that mission are determined by the public through their politicians but once that framework is established, it is up to the soldiers on the ground to decide how to get there.

Anti-science hippies hate science when it comes to issues like genetics, while anti-science religious fundamentalists hate science for...well, the same thing.  The left thinks it is dangerous to carefully modify corn to be more resistant to disease and pests while the right thinks it is dangerous to tamper with human life more directly.

Researchers in Nature have edged a little closer to the gray area, which means if the public objects, they will be called "anti-science" by the usual hand-wringers but that's rather like contending anyone who objects to multiple wars for eternity is anti-military.  

(Interlude: Dear militant science bloggers out there.  If you got this far, it is now okay to wave your hands and shriek "false equivalence!" and run away)

The Nature research created early-stage human embryos that were partial genetic clones of diabetic patients but they weren't 'clones' in the way people commonly think of them.  Instead, each embryo carried three sets of chromosomes, which means they couldn't ever have been viable if they were implanted in a womb and carried to term.  For that reason, and to avoid the firestorm, they don't call it 'cloning' even though it doesn't really have any clinical implications other than in a precautionary principle sense. I'm going to go ahead and call it cloning because, really, that is what we are getting at and I'll leave it to 'framing' experts in media to put spin on it.

As David Cyranoski writes in a Nature overview of the paper, we are coming full circle again: "they have managed a feat that has at times been thought impossible, then inevitable, then completed, then incomplete and unfeasible."   Basically, there is a big ol' science train coming at society and it needs to be addressed rationally. That does not mean rationalizing as 'moral' the concerns of PETA or anti-GMO types while carpet bombing people who are concerned about cloning humans as 'anti-science', it means having an understanding of a legitimate science benefit (not hype and promises) and weighing it against the ethical concerns of the public.

iPS cell research has a way to go, as does the politicized and therefore over-hyped hESC research, and this may be a better technology in the future so the policy discussion should start now.  Stem cell research had no objections from anyone for decades until a technique was created to make hESC research easy and it became a hot-button because a very small subset of the science community wanted to be outside any policy yet have taxpayer-funding to do it.  A new, frank discussion and some decisions made while addressing ethical concerns will go a long way toward keeping politics out of science.

Citation: Scott Noggle, Ho-Lim Fung, Athurva Gore, Hector Martinez, Kathleen Crumm Satriani, Robert Prosser, Kiboong Oum, Daniel Paull, Sarah Druckenmiller, Matthew Freeby, Ellen Greenberg, Kun Zhang, Robin Goland, Mark V. Sauer, Rudolph L. Leibel&Dieter Egli, 'Human oocytes reprogram somatic cells to a pluripotent state', Nature 478, 70–75 (06 October 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10397