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The very real possibility of creating embryos from stem cells raises ethical issues that need to be debated now, scientists say.

"We think these are serious issues that we have to consider carefully as scientists before we go too far and get into an area where people would be genuinely uncomfortable with what they're seeing," said Professor Martin Pera, a stem cell scientist at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Pera raised the issue with others in the journal Nature Methods, and said scientists could be using pluripotent stem cells in a dish to grow something that resembles a three- to four-week embryo within just a couple of years.

Pluripotent stem cells, which are able to become any cell in the body, provide scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to study early human development and could possibly help in the creation of organs for transplant.

Last year, scientists showed it was possible to get human pluripotent stem cells to "mimic the body plan of the post-implantation embryo", Professor Pera said.

The experiments were able to coax the human pluripotent...