In the name of research

The creator of Dolly the sheep has been granted a licence to clone human embryos for medical research. Professor Ian Wilmut and Kings College London scientists will clone early stage embryos to study motor neurone disease (MND). Of course there have been the usual critics....some maintain that testing human embryos is immoral. Others question the potential benefits of the work. Others critisise the necessary destruction of embryos as part of the research. Professor Wilmut said it will mean MND can be studied in unprecedented detail.

Professor Wilmut is also quoted (on the BBC Website) as saying " Our aim will be to generate stem cells purely for research purposes". This statement seems like he's attempting some sort of special 'scientific/research' justification for doing this work. Is this the case? Is doing something for 'research purposes' so different from doing it for other reasons. Is doing something for 'research purposes' better than doing something for commercial/financial reasons or for social or political reasons.

It's intersting to consider if we could apply this 'research justification' to other areas related to this topic......In response to the news of Willmut being granted his 'cloning licence', a spokesperson for Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) said: "'Human cloning remains dangerous, undesirable and unnecessary". But do we really know if this is actually the case? Nobody can be one-hundred percent certain whether it's even technically possible to clone an entire human (in the same way as Dolly the Sheep). And we don't know if such a clone would survive, be healthy, suffer any long-term genetic problems, or whether there would be specific economic and social benefits to cloning humans etc. So, in order to answer is there justification to start a project cloning humans.....purely for research purposes of course?

The voxScience Team.

How nigh is the end, really?

With the newspapers full of stories of global warming, it seems that - to coin a phrase - we're all doomed. If the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are right, a global rise in temperature of 1-4 centigrade is already in the post, with consequences of rising sea levels, rapidly changing ecosystems and mad weather. If their worst fears are realised, the change could be as much as 11 degrees, which would be apocalyptic on a geological scale.

But doesn't part of every generation believe itself to be living at the end of days? When I was a kid, it was nuclear war, or the return of the ice age (or both). St Paul believed the day of judgement was upon us, and that torch has been handed down for1900 years. Every civilisation has its prophets of doom. The irony is that sooner or later, the stormcrows are right.

So are we the final generation? The final desperate flowering on the ailing tree of humanity? Are we wasting our time educating our kids for the information economy, when they'd be better served learning the survival skills and bushcraft needed to start from scratch in a Wyndhamesque new Eden? Or should we all just stop worrying and learn to love the smog?