Are motherless babies really a step forward?

You can, I maintain, get the Brits to agree to almost any biomedical advance – I use the word in its neutral sense – no matter how repellent, on the basis that it helps sick kiddies or the infertile. So we now have a situation whereby you can actually create human embryos for the purpose of experimentation – thereby instrumentalising the human being in unprecedented fashion. We have also allowed for the creation of three-parent embryos (on the odd basis that mitochondrial DNA is somehow unimportant). And if we don’t have cross-species zygotes yet, it’s only because the process has proved scientifically unfruitful, rather than because David Cameron didn’t give his backing to it.

Now we’ve got another British advance on the bioethics front; the prospect of creating embryos without the benefit of female gametes as a result of an experiment on mice by the University of Bath. It demonstrates that in theory any cell in the human body could be fertilised by a sperm.