Reprogramming, not embryos, is the fast track to cures

An extremely significant medical breakthrough, reported many places, including the New York Times:

Biologists at Harvard have converted cells from a mouse’s pancreas into the insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in diabetes, suggesting that the natural barriers between the body’s cell types may not be as immutable as supposed.

"Money" second paragraph quote:

This and other recent experiments raise the possibility that a patient’s healthy cells might be transformed into the type lost to a disease far more simply and cheaply than in the cumbersome proposals involving stem cells.

Pause. When was the last time you can remember a mainstream article admitting that stem cell proposals are "cumbersome"? I thought they were the be-all & end-all of medical technology? And embryonic stem cell treatments are often even more cumbersome than adult stem cell therapies.

I'm not trying to make an argument against embryonic stem cell research because they are "cumbersome", sometimes cumbersome solutions are the only ones available. No, I'm saying that, pragmatically, it makes more sense to pursue reprogramming techniques like the one described above.

And no embryos have to die.