UK issues license to clone human embryos

This is despicable:

The British government gave the scientist whose team cloned Dolly the sheep a license on Tuesday to clone human embryos for research. Dr. Ian Wilmut, who led the Dolly team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996, and Dr. Christopher Shaw, a motor neuron expert of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, plan to clone embyros to study how nerve cells go awry to cause motor neuron diseases. The experiments do not involve creating cloned babies.

By the way, in 1997, Wilmut came out against human cloning:

In a series of appearances in Washington this week, soft-spoken Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, is arguing that cloning technology can and should be controlled. "I think now to contemplate using our present technique with humans would be quite inhuman," Wilmut said at a news conference before the hearings. "We would welcome any rules for an international agreement of any kind to prohibit this work. I think you shouldn't underestimate the difficulties of this research," Wilmut told the Senate Committee of Public Health and Safety.

Lord Acton was right.