Reviews of Ian Wilmut’s book, After Dolly, miss what I believe is its most important characteristic. The book is essentially two different compositions. The first of these parts is a superb narrative of the creation of Dolly the sheep which is then loosely integrated with the second part, a naive or perhaps single-minded defense of further research on human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. Concealed in this loose integration is the clear but unintended message that the research which Ian Wilmut so passionately advocates can be accomplished by means that do not involve the killing of embryonic human beings.

The narrative covers both the detailed research work which resulted in Dolly as well as the background leading up to that work. Wilmut has done a superb job in describing this exquisitely complex task in a highly readable style (no high tech jargon, no distracting footnotes, real people). The narrative illustrates the grinding, repetitive, work involved in this kind of research as well as the random insertion of flashes of genius and the critical importance of the worldwide, often informal, links among the scientists. He provides generous recognition to his predecessors and collaborators.

Perhaps most importantly for that hidden message Wilmut’s narrative points out the value of research on animal embryology because of the genetic similarity between animals and humans.

Wilmut’s disputation on future research on human embryology is more of a random walk through a variety of the arguments for and against such work. While Wilmut is a staunch supporter of this research, and properly so, his arguments are often morally naive (“Do the ends – new treatments for horrific diseases – always justify the means?” page 34), contain a number of misstatements or unawareness of facts (“In the United States, under President George W. Bush, federal funding was withdrawn from studies with human embryos ---“ page 199) , and are often self contradicting (“No matter how slippery the slope, it is easy to draw a well defined line on it—“ page 220,”However laws forbid; they do not always prevent.” page 224).

More importantly he gives little attention to other forms of human stem cells (“ -side-by-side comparison of adult and embryonic varieties of stem cells must be done—“ page 166) They have been done. ASCs beat ESCs 72 to 0 in the last such comparison.

In spite of the weakness of Wilmut’s arguments he presents more than sufficient grounds to justify proceeding with research in this area of biotech albeit with more societal controls than implied by Wilmut. His narrative section not only establishes clearly the advances which can be accomplished by dedicated researchers but it also establishes the existence of a vast chasm of missing knowledge. In animal research he and others developed alternative paths or ‘workarounds’ for these gaps. In human research such workarounds would be unacceptable.

Wilmut’s objectives, the unarguably valuable search for improving human health, can be achieved by continuing with the discovery power of animal research so dramatically demonstrated in his narrative of the Dolly achievement and by research on adult and other forms of human stem cells which do not involve the killing of human embryos.