RESEARCH

“Dream Girl” of yesteryears Hema Malini was, in January-February, in the eye of a storm for reportedly asking the migrant labour class from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — it’s funny, they are referred to pejoratively with the respectable address bhaiya — to leave Mumbai for ‘home’. It must be her personal opinion as none from her party, the BJP, seconded her ‘motion’, though some said she was misquoted. Her concern, if it may be termed so, is however not uncommon among Maharashtrians and people from other parts of the country eking out a living in Mumbai. This is a bogey often raised by the Shiv Sena too. It would do Maharashtrians a world of good if they stopped looking at Gujaratis with envy and Biharis with disgust. Why not compete with them with entrepreneurial skills and hard labour respectively? Those averse to the bhaiya s forward a specious logic of economics to make their grievance sound authentic. They say these people mostly do not have identity proofs. Obviously, they also don’...

From the issue of cloning to publication of research in journals to intelligence tests carried out on various peoples to reproductive health, a brigade of 'conscience keepers' springs up to protest something it does not understand fully Cloning is now a hot topic of discussion in the fora of medical ethics. Prof Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh University, who gained celebrity status and attracted criticism equally for cloning the first mammal from an adult cell in 1996, has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryoes which he was awarded two years ago in favour of a method pioneered by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, Japan, who has managed to create stem cells from fragments of skin in mice without using embryos. A UN report called last week for efforts to ban reproductive cloning worldwide after a US research team reported the first-ever cloning of a rhesus monkey whose embryo was cloned from adult cells and then grown to generate stem cells. 'Moralists' ...