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A rose is a rose is a rose, even if - like many commercial plants - it is essentially a clone. But is a normal human blastocyst, a microscopic bubble of proto-life that forms about five days after sperm meets egg, the same as a cloned blastocyst?

That may seem an arcane technical question in the debate about human cloning, reignited last week with the announcement by South Korean scientists that they had cloned a human embryo and harvested embryonic stem cells from it. But scientists, politicians and bioethicists have been grappling for years with the biological and moral subtleties encapsulated by that tiny dot of tissue.

The future of human therapeutic cloning in this country - the laws governing it, the knowledge to be gained from it, the ethical costs of doing it and the medicines it might eventually bestow - may hinge on how society views that question.

In last week's report in the journal Science, researchers at Seoul National University described how they had created some 30 cloned human blastocysts in order to harvest human embryonic stem...