Today it’s baby murder.  Tomorrow you’ll be cloning Jonathan Ross’ is often the gist of the argument by pro-life campaigners against stem cell research. But recent advances in stem cell research make the ‘baby murder’ argument irrelevant. And more pertinently, who would ever want to clone Jonathan Ross?

This week, Professor Anthony Hollander visited Cambridge to talk about how he harvested cells from a woman’s bone marrow and used them to grow a windpipe which was then transplanted back into the same woman. The patient, who was a wheezing invalid after contracting tuberculosis, is now fit and healthy. No embryos were used.

Anti-cloning arguments range from the optimistic to the absurd. In their hypothetical fantasy world of the future ‘anti-cloners’ want you to believe that a strand of your hair will be sinisterly plucked from your head at the bus stop and your carbon copy, will be ready by lunchtime, before being mass-produced to take over the world.

Let’s be sensible and unbiased about this. Let’s assume that cloning humans is possible and common in the way ‘test tube babies’ are common. Is it acceptable for a couple to conceive a child for the sole purpose of being a donor match of an existing one?  What about cloning one? Twins, triplets and so on already exist in nature. How are triplets produced by cloning different to triplets produced by IVF? The only difference is the route, the technical science, used to achieve the final result.  They both involve human intervention and they are both equally easy to abuse. The only difference at this point in time is that cloning is not as technically easy as IVF.

Unlike other controversial science – the MMR vaccine causing autism, say, or the validity of vitamin pills – opposition to stem cell research is not a matter of disputing factual data or of horror stories about the results. The real worry seems to be about the intentions behind the science.