Right now, cloning technology is very unreliable--with only a handful of successes for every attempt in animals.
In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush advocated outlawing all use of cloning technology on human cells.
Many doctors, including some at the forefront of cloning technology, have expressed severe doubts about whether the techniques could ever ethically be used on humans.
With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis.
However, the technique is so close to the "cloning" technology used to create Dolly the sheep that it will raise difficult ethical questions for doctors.
But scientists are keen to develop the cloning aspects of the technology because this would yield perfect match tissue that would not be rejected by the patient.
Orion Genomics hopes to start pulling in revenues next year from its proprietary method of sequencing, mapping and cloning agricultural genes--technology that can be used to improve crop yield, develop pest resistance or help plants survive drought, flooding and cold.
BioTransplant (nasdaq: BTRN - news - people ), another company that hoped to use cloning in embryonic stem-cell technology, has fared far worse.
The citation for his knighthood credits Prof Wilmut with "revolutionising" biology through the cloning technique which underpins the science of stem cell technology.
The best-known of the new knights is Professor Wilmut, who is said to have revolutionised biology by successfully pioneering the cloning technique that underpins the science of stem cell technology.
Less successful was the cloning of the gaur, a species of ox found in south Asia, by researchers at Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company in Worcester, Massachusetts: the clone died of infection days after birth.
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