IAN WILMUT, the creator of Dolly the sheep and newly appointed director of Edinburgh University’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine, wants to experiment on dying people with embryonic stem cells–even though he admits that such potential treatments “have not been properly tested.”

Wilmut’s plan, which in essence would use people with terminal neurological conditions as lab rats, is the latest example of the dehumanizing impetus that is inherent to embryonic stem-cell research and human cloning. It is also an important story. With the fall of the fraudulent South Korean cloning researcher Woo-Suk Hwang, Wilmut may be the world’s premier human cloning researcher. When a scientist of his international stature calls for experimenting on living human beings before such procedures would normally be ethical to perform, it demands our attention.