Cloning could beat hereditary illness

A scientist who helped to create Dolly the sheep has suggested that cloning and gene alteration should be used to create babies free from hereditary diseases.
Professor Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, says in a new book that cloning a 100-cell embryo is not the same as cloning a human and that it would be ``immoral' not to use the technology to help families.
He describes how it would be possible to remove stem cells from an embryo affected by a hereditary disease and modify genetic faults which could otherwise cause conditions such as Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis. These modified cells would then be cloned to create a new embryo free from disease.