AP | Malcolm Ritter | Nov. 20, 2007

Scientists have created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells, a breakthrough that could someday produce new treatments for disease without the explosive moral questions of embyro cloning.

Research teams in the United States and Japan showed that a simple lab technique can rival the complex and highly controversial idea of extracting stem cells from cloned embryos. It was a landmark achievement on all fronts, defusing one of the most divisive debates in modern medicine and religion. It was lauded by scientists, ethicists and religious groups.

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Baptist Press | Nov. 19, 2007

Cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut says he will no longer use in stem cell research the technique that resulted in the creation of Dolly the sheep but will instead pursue another form of experimentation that does not require the destruction of embryos.

Wilmut’s announcement led some to speculate it might mark the “beginning of the end,” as the British newspaper The Telegraph described it, for research, or therapeutic, cloning.

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National Review Online The Editors October 24, 2006

The pro-cloning ballot initiative in Missouri has a lot going for it: industry backing, celebrity endorsements, bipartisan support, and great press. What it lacks is honesty; and if opponents hammer home that point between now and Election Day, it may yet go down to a richly deserved defeat.

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Time Magazine Alice Park July 2, 2006

Ten years after Dolly’s birth, scientists are learning that clones may not be such perfect copies after all.

It was 10 years ago this week, on a warm July night, that a newborn lamb with an unique pedigree took her first breath in a small shed tucked in the Scottish hills a few miles south of Edinburgh. From the outside, she looked no different from thousands of other sheep born each summer on surrounding farms. But Dolly, as the world soon came to realize, was no ordinary lamb. She was cloned from a single mammary cell of an adult ewe, overturning long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible. Her birth set off a race in laboratories around the world to duplicate the breakthrough. It also raised the specter–however distant–of human cloning.

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