I just came across some very exciting science news: two separate research teams have announced that they’ve found a way to turn ordinary adult skin cells into stem cells, those amazing little shapeshifters that can become any of the 200 types of cells found throughout the human body and which hold the potential of solving any number of illnesses. Not only is this an impressive technical achievement, but it offers a way out of the pesky ethical debate that surrounds the use of embryonic stem cells for research or therapy.

(For the record, I personally have no problem with using embryonic stem cells for research or therapy. Fertility clinics all over the country dispose of thousands of embryos every day. What’s more immoral: chucking them in the dumpster with last night’s Chinese take-out, or repurposing them to ease human suffering? Pretty simple equation in my view.)

This new breakthrough isn’t without its own problems, of course:

Their enthusiasm notwithstanding, scientists warned that medical treatments are not immediately at hand. The new method uses genetically engineered viruses to transform adult cells into embryo-like ones, and those viruses can trigger tumors.But the cells will be instantly useful for research — “to move a patient’s disease into a petri dish,” as Daley put it. And some scientists predicted that, with the basic secret now in hand, it could be a mere matter of months before virus-free methods for making the versatile cells are found.

Nevertheless, it feels like we’re really, really close to something truly wonderful. Close enough that I can’t help but feel impatient for its arrival. How long before anyone who needs a new heart or liver can get one, a perfect genetic match grown from a simple arm scrape in a matter of days or weeks instead of forcing them to wait for years for a suitable donor to die? How long before men and women like the late Chris Reeve can get up out of their chairs and walk again, thanks to a regenerated spinal cord? How long before the dreaded words “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” cease to have any meaning? The end of all that “vale of tears” shit can’t come soon enough for me.

In a lot of ways, I despise living at this moment in history. The future we’ve been given, full of political turmoil, economic uncertainty, and plain old fear, isn’t the one we were promised by popular culture. But there are compensations for all that, aren’t there? A few, anyway…