Are induced pluripotent stem cells the same as cloning?

Chinese researchers have announced that they have created induced pluripotent stem cells and have used them to produce living mice.  From USA Today:

The paper writes that two teams of Chinese researchers succeeded in "inducing cells from connective tissue in mice to revert back to their embryonic state and producing living mice from them."

I had to scratch my head at this because of the nature of iPS cells.  Induced pluripotent stem cells are cells that are reprogrammed to an embryonic state by introducing genes into the cell or by growing them in a certain medium.  These cells are, as the name suggests, pluripotent, which means that they can become all of the roughly 200 cell types in the body. 

So why did this announcement confuse me?  Because pluripotent cells are not whole organisms.  They lack the ability to become placenta tissue and therefore are not on their own a complete organism.  They are just cells.  Only a totipotent cell has the ability to become all of the cells in the body plus placenta.  A zygote, the product of conception, or the product of somatic cell nuclear transfer (better known as cloning) is totipotent.

The Church does not object to research on pluripotent cells because they are just cells not organisms, so to date the Church has not come out against iPS cells.  The Church DOES object to creating and destroying human organisms to obtain pluripotent stem cells for research.  Which is why the Church opposes embryonic stem cell research and cloning because they create and or destroy human organisms for research.

But if induced pluripotent stem cells can by themselves give rise to mice, then should the Church oppose iPS cells as well?  Does the act of inducing pluripotency give rise to a new organism?  It would seem on the surface that it does, but let us dig a little deeper.  From the LA Times:

The technique that the two teams of Chinese researchers used is called tetraploid complementation. When researchers first started studying iPS cells, they would assess their properties by injecting them into a blastocyst, a very early embryo. What they found in those studies was that the iPS cells and the host embryo's cells would contribute to the resulting animal, producing a chimera - a mosaic of genetically different cells.

More recently, researchers have fused the cells of the host blastocyst so that each cell contains double the number of chromosomes, making them tetraploid. When that is done, the host cells can form only the placental tissues; all the animal's tissues must come from the injected iPS cells.

What you need to take home in this scientific jargon is that the iPS cells alone did not give rise to the new mice.  They were fused with an existing blastocyst (a 5 to 7 day old embryo) that provided the ability to make a placenta.

Some have likened iPS cells to somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning:

Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass., who was also not involved in the studies, cautioned that the results "revive many of the same ethical issues as reproductive cloning." Although generating fetuses with iPS techniques is technically different from cloning, the bottom line is the same -- the generation of an organism that is genetically identical to the source of the donor cells.

I think this is wrong.  Creating iPS cells is not the same thing as cloning.  As shown above, creating iPS cells alone does not create a new organism.  The iPS cells were fused with an altered embryo to give rise to the mice in the study.  Somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning, on the other hand, does create a whole organism that is capable of growing into a fetus, infant, etc., on its own.  (This has been shown in all of the various species that have been cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer.)  There is a scientific, and more importantly, MORAL difference that cannot be lost in this story.

In light of this further knowledge on the way in which these mice were generated, I believe we as Catholics can still support induced pluripotent stem cell research as an alternative to cloning and destroying embryos to obtain pluripotent stem cells.