ABSTRACT
One of the most interesting claims in Gina Kolata's Clone: the Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead comes at the very end of her highly informative and engaging narrative. Two years after Dolly, the cloning debate offers a benchmark case-study of late-twentieth-century public debate about reproductive technology and the new genetics. Only one published response to the cloning episode has responded to the paradox, and that is the highly informative report by the Wellcome Trust Medicine and Society programme, entitled Public Perspectives on Human Cloning, which presents the results of a specially commissioned study. With the development of modern molecular biology techniques such as polymerase chain reaction, cloning has arguably become the single most important research technique in contemporary biogenetic science. Twins can be described as clones, if genetic identity is the measure of what a clone is, but cloning is also used to describe complex procedures, such as nuclear transfer, a form of cell fusion.
