Beware the cowboy cloners

Here we go again. Reading the excited claims for the medical benefits likely to accrue from the Korean veterinary researchers' success in growing cloned human pre-embryos, one is entitled to feeling a certain deja vu. Heading the list were those old favourites, treatments for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. There really needs to be a phrase to describe this researchers' equivalent of the old charge against doctors of shroud waving.

After all, only a few weeks back we were told that the planned primate research centre in Cambridge was crucial in the search for treatments for just the same diseases. The truth is that no one knows if stem cells - the intended end product of therapeutic cloning - will have such curative powers, still less the solution to the spinal injuries Christopher Reeve was hoping for in Friday's Guardian. The right way to find out - the way biomedical research normally proceeds - is to try the methods first with laboratory animals. And so far their success, even for the best-understood condition - Parkinson's - has been limited. This isn't...