The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"

 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19869673

I saw this myself very recently. This should thankfully aid human health exponentially, as ethics groups who stopped stem cells in their tracks due to their source being fetuses can no longer make such claims.

I am not so sure it was the MERCs that stopped the research - it was authorities and governments and the religious fundamentalists that those politicians were beholden to. But yes, I agree wholeheartedly with you and hope that this will allow greater freedom of research. It was worrying me that the more countries that buckled and gave in to the anti-progress brigade, the more that research on this area would be forced to those countries with little to no ethical oversight. And this is an area where we must give all due attention to ethical considerations - and we have already drawn up ethical limits - but those limits and any guidelines should be based on sound ethical moral principles and not on minority religious hysteria.