• Between 2000 and 2050, the population of Americans between 45 and 64 will rise from 61 million to 85 million, but the population of 65s and over will grow from 34 to 79 million, with those 85 and over rising from 4 to 18 million.
• Living longer will mean longer periods of chronic illness and dependency before death. "An unprecedented number of people will need long-term care, not just for months but for years".
• America is facing an alarming shortage of care-givers because of smaller, more mobile and more fragmented families.
• The report strongly opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide as antithetical to ethical caregiving for people with disability". "One cannot think wholeheartedly about how best to care for the life the patient has now if ending his or her life becomes, for us, always an eligible treatment option," it says.
• The goal of care is not to prolong life as long as medically possible, but to benefit the life the patient still has.
• Advance directives, or living wills, are flawed. Advanced proxy directives are more valuable.
• A presidential commission on ageing, dementia and long-term care should be set up to recommend policies for innovation and reform.

However, it now appears that defective embryos are able to correct defects as they mature. One American experiment discovered that about half of the cells in "defective" embryos were normal by the blastocyst stage. This suggested two things to the fertility specialists. First, that defective embryos might be a viable source of embryonic stem cells, and second, that many embryos discarded as defective could have developed into healthy babies.

One of the main attractions of Hwang's initiative is bypassing political, regulatory and financial barriers to embryonic stem cell research in the US. According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, a number of prominent US stem cell scientists are enthusiastic about the project because it will enable them to study diseases.

Many researchers believe that human embryonic stem cells may turn out to be even more valuable for studying the mechanisms of disease and for screening experimental drugs than for cell-based therapy, although it is their potential for providing replacements for dead or diseased cells and tissues that has captured the public imagination," writes Dr Susan Okie, a contributing editor of the NEJM.

An article in the on-line magazine Slate by David Plotz explains how South Korea has managed to become the cloning capital of the world without much funding or even a track record in biotech. The key to success is the extraordinary ability of Hwang himself, but some national characteristics help make his work more productive. Koreans are not "preoccupied with moral questions about the beginning of life". Despite an official ban on abortions, it has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

The idea is to inject stem cells from aborted foetuses into the children's brains with the hope that they will graft to existing brain cells and replace the defective cells. It is a risky operation, but the alternative is certain death from the disease, say supporters of the experiment.