Truly a great 24 hours for medical science. First a Korean team demonstrates scaleable harvesting of own-brand embryonic stem cells, then the British team in Newcastle-upon-Tyne clones a complete human embryo. Great stuff - the basic building blocks of life, created in a lab ready to go to work just like a chip from raw silicates.
Obviously the USA's talking heads are already shrieking. But let's see if they're still saying the same when stem cell research offers them a new liver and replacement tissue for their rotted hearts, shall we?
Bringing me to my dirty little secret: I'm addicted to Brand New You, a UK reality show where the camera goes in close to some serious plastic surgery - facelifts, dental implants, breasts, the whole kit and caboodle. And it's utterly fascinating. I force myself to watch, because the skill of the surgeons - and their love for their work - is infectious; they really seem to get a kick out of what they do.
Combined with today's 'serious' medical announcements, I'm even more sure that death and aging just aren't things anyone under 40 needs to worry about. Stem cells and other discoveries will delete hereditaries from your genome, snip cancers from every cell, retrofit scarred stroke tissue and stop your brain atrophying to mush. We'll get there. Give it 40 years.