By Steve Connor

Sir Ian Wilmut is the man who created Dolly the sheep, or at least that is how he is usually described in the media. However, by his own admission, this is not accurate. According to Sir Ian the man who did most in terms of this breakthrough was Professor Keith Campbell, who deserves “66 per cent” of the credit. Sir Ian has said quite emphatically that it would be wrong to describe him as the creator of Dolly.

The issue has come to a head (again) following a petition to the Queen to have Sir Ian stripped of his knighthood, signed by four former employees of the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh where the work was carried out. I would guess that the petition has no chance of success, but it raises the intriguing question of whether Professor Campbell’s contribution to the breakthrough has been overlooked.

By Steve Connor

Some see them as a green alternative to petrol and diesel but, as always, it is important to measure up the costs and as well as the benefits of biofuels, and the only way of doing this is by studying the entire production process from “farm to forecourt”. This life-cycle assessment is absolutely critical in figuring out whether biofuels are better for the environment than fossil fuels. Above all, it is important to include questions about the land on which the biofuel crop is grown.

By Steve Connor

Scientific breakthroughs are a bit like London buses, you wait for one and then along comes two at the same time. This was the case with the announcement that two groups, one in the US and one in Japan, had independently derived embryonic-like stem cells from human skin tissue. The breakthrough means that it may soon be possible to grow "spare part" tissues in the laboratory for transplant surgery to treat illnesses such as Parkinson's disease or spinal cord injuries -- see my news piece in The Independent.

By Steve Connor

We now have more details of the monkey cloning work carried out by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre following the publication of the full scientific paper in Nature. The paper concentrates on the work to extract stem cells from the few dozen cloned embryos created using a new microscopic technique that does not damage the delicate cellular material of primates. The scientists are to be congratulated on their success in producing the first validated embryonic stem cells from any cloned mammal other than a mouse.