LEADING scientists last night rejected a new ‘ethical’ stem cell technique insisting it would do nothing to annoy fundamentalist Christians.

The new method takes human skin cells and makes them behave like embryonic stem cells in a breakthrough that has disappointed researchers across the globe.

But Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “I did not spend eight years at university just to adopt research methods that do not annoy the holy living shit out of the Jesus freaks.

“I got into this business to take science and rub it in their stupid, medieval, voodoo faces.

“It always puzzled me why they got so annoyed given that the embryo in question had no brain or nervous system and how to the untrained eye it was impossible to tell if was a human or a sea horse.

“Nevertheless they would open up their bibles and point to the bits about the sanctity of this and the holiness of that and I’d point to the bit about how it’s forbidden to eat cormorants.”

Professor Brubaker said he and his colleagues liked to play with the tiny embryos and would often use them to act out scenes from the New Testament including the Sermon on the Mount and the feeding of the five thousand.

The professor stressed that stem cells will also have a wide range of clinical uses with the exception of bringing someone back to life after they have been nailed to a cross, ‘because that’s just a dangerously insane fairy story’.

He added: “If only I could find some way of manipulating the embryo to make it gay.”