Sure, we all think that baby lambs are cute and cuddly, but the birth of a lamb is rarely the occasion for headlines around the world. But the birth of a particular lamb named Dolly in February 1997 was indeed cause for just such worldwide notice because Dolly represented what was then (although the pace of technology is so fast that it already seems old hat) an astonishing scholarly and technological breakthrough. For Dolly was something close to a virgin birth: She had come into being not in the good old fashion mammalian way of egg and sperm coming together but rather through the cloning of the cells of an adult mammal. Suddenly the process of cloning, which before Dolly had seemed something very much a part of the world of late-night science fiction movies still, became not only possible but even probable as an ordinary event. And with this suddenly much higher profile of cloning the entire arena of stem cell research also became much better known to the general public. This paper examines the field of stem cell research and in particular its links with cloning as a way of exploring how stem cell research is increasingly allowing scholars to recreate the entire complex physiology of adult mammals - a concatenation of structures and processes that were developed over millions of years of natural selection and evolutionary change and that now seem - for both better and worse - almost within our grasp to control and manipulate (Elliott, 2000, p. 82).
Stem cell research is a part of the larger field of physiology, which has as its major goals an overall understanding of how organisms work as well as how the different systems (for example, the circulatory system) within each organism works). However, while we should never disparate pure research for its own sake, physiological research and especially stem cell research are important not simply for the fact that they expand our knowledge but also for the fact that the knowledge produc...