According to a Feb. 17, 2010 Times Online article, Dr. Thomas Okarma, CEO of Geron, admitted that Geron Corporation delayed asking for FDA approval for the first clinical trial using stem cells taken from human embryos in 2009. Okarma said their experiment to treat people with spinal cord injuries was delayed to give the Obama administration credit: "That was our timing. We did not want this to come up under the Bush Administration. We designed it."
When the voters passed Proposal 2 more than one year ago, they approved an amendment to the Michigan Constitution allowing embryos remaining from fertility treatments to be destroyed for their stem cells. The amendment does not allow buying or selling embryos, the embryos must be less than two weeks into development and the parents donating their embryonic children must give their written consent.
Stanford researchers have turned normal skin fibroblasts from mice into functioning nerve cells without reverting them back to an embryonic-like state. The biological shortcut demonstrated in this experiment and others shows that this process could be used instead of using embryonic stem cells or reverting cells into induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). 
