First, it may be a wake-up call needed to pass some laws prohibiting both medical and industrial laboratories from certain types of experimentation. Second, it calls into question the proprietary relationship that companies can have to organisms. If the latter, Dolly becomes patentable. The research to produce Dolly, after all, was done in a pharmaceutical company, not in a university or medical research center. They want returns on capital investments.
Patents become more important than papers.
Human cloning and germline manipulation may be nearer than we think. In recent months, proposals have been forthcoming saying that cloning should be legalized and that germline gene therapy and enhancement should not be stopped. For more on this, click here . For more information and reports of animal cloning and its consequences, click here . Click here for further discussions concerning human germline manipulation and human cloning .