LONDON: It's a news which is guaranteed to send shockwaves through the scientific establishment - the creator of Dolly the sheep has decided to shun cloning.
Prof Ian Wilmut and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they cloned Dolly from an adult cell.
But now he has made up his mind not to pursue a licence to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago.
"I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer," 'The Daily Telegraph' reported on Saturday, quoting Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom, as saying.
His decision to turn his back on 'therapeutic cloning' came just days after researchers in the United States had announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates.
In fact, according to Prof Wilmut, a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as the "nuclear transfer."
The scientist has admitted that the Japanese approach is also "easier to accept socially" and can be used to grow a patient's own cells and tissues for a range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson's.
The Japanese method comes from the research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, which suggests a way to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the pro-life movement.
Prof Yamanaka has shown in mice how to turn skin cells into what look like versatile stem cells potentially capable of overcoming the effects of disease.
