Stem cell sirens

Mediawatch: Bernard Dixon looks at the UK reaction to two closely related stories. Was it a great triumph for the UK or a much more significant advance by a pioneering team in the Far East? Britain’s media were unsure and divided on 20 May, when they had to handle two closely related stories. The first was a paper in Science in which Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues at Seoul National University, South Korea, announced a breakthrough in producing stem cells from cloned human embryos. The second was the announcement of the first human embryo cloned in Britain by Miodrag Stojkovic, Alison Murdoch and co-workers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne