Currently, Altered Nuclear Transfer is defined and being promoted by Dr. William Hurlbut, a Stanford bioethicist as a solution to ethical questions involved in stem cell research. The goal in this procedure being how to create stem cells without creating a developed embryo. That brings to the the question .....

What Is Altered Nuclear Transfer? (ANT?)

The intent is to create embryonic masses of cells that could never develop into a complete human embryos, while still producing stem cells. This process has been demonstrated in mouse cells that had genetic mutations that caused the embryos to die at the blastocyst stage.

Altered Nuclear Transfer would be similar to SCNT in that cellular nuclear material from one set of human cells is transfered into another set of human cells. The key difference is that the resulting cells should carry a mutation that causes cell death at the blastocyst stage, thereby never developing in theory into a full embryo.

This process has never been tested on human cells to date, and has only been demonstrated on mouse cells, and is not current supported by many medical organizations .. like the New England Journal of Medicine as an example.