Legislators were outraged. House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi said that the regulations "clearly fly in the face of both the law as passed and legislative intent". The Lieutenant Governor's spokesman said that "it is a mistake to impose regulations that could have a chilling effect on those individuals at the forefront of this emerging field".

What was all the fuss about, Massachusetts voters might ask. After all therapeutic cloning is clearly legal. Didn't Harvard's stem cell institute get all that it wanted? Apparently not, especially after the Korean debacle showed that cloning human embryos will be far harder than it envisaged. At the moment, says the institute's principal investigator, Kevin Eggan, "it may or may not ever become a reality". And if it doesn't, researchers need a "reasonable alternative".

The alternative Eggan has in mind is recruiting genetically suitable donors whose sperm and eggs could be combined in vitro to create embryos for research. This is a practice which is permitted in the UK, but banned in France, Australia and Canada. And it was, says the health council, also banned under the Massachusetts law which forbade creating embryos to be donated for research. This doesn't apply to us, say the scientists. We don't want to create embryos to be donated, but to be used.

However, in an apparent attempt to blindside supporters, a report was commissioned by the Prime Minister from a Canberra consulting group. It was asked to assess whether scientific advances warranted changing the 2002 law. This piece of legislation was passed after a long, emotional and exhausting debate across party lines -- and Prime Minister John Howard obviously does not care to have this repeated. The report, submitted in June, but released to the public only recently, found that there had been no significant changes in the intervening four years.

An article by Dr Robert Lanza, of Advanced Cell Technology, had claimed that a cell biopsied from an eight-cell human embryo could develop into embryonic stem cell lines without harming the embryo itself. However, it transpired that none of the embryos had actually survived his experiment. Nature, whose press release declared that the embryos had been left "intact", was forced to issue two "clarifications" and to post supplementary data on its website. The main conclusions of Lanza's paper are not disputed, but Nature may edit his abstract for greater clarity.

Lanza explained the confusion to the Philadelphia Inquirer by arguing that it was well-known from IVF procedures that 8-celled embryos could survive a biopsy. It was unnecessary to ensure that his embryos did as well. The Inquirer dismissed this as "dissembling".

Such is the promise of synthetic biology that billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has invested millions of dollars into a project to defeat malaria. Jay Keasling, of the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to redesign an antimalarial drug called artemisinin by building a metabolic pathway into yeast cells so that they can synthesise a chemical which currently is available only in a Chinese herbal remedy.

There are several different approaches to creating new life or new varieties of life. One is assembling organisms from off-the-shelf bio-bricks, strands of DNA which have universal connectors at each end. These can be linked together to form higher-level components. Another is redesigning natural components, as Dr Keasling is doing. A similar project takes genes in bacteria and fungi which can digest cellulose, the molecules which form a plant's skeleton, to create yeast cells which can convert whole plants into ethanol. This would be a major breakthrough for environmentally friendly fuels.

A more audacious project is creating an artificial organism. This is the ambition of Dr Craig Venter, famed as the entrepreneur who sequenced the human genome. He wants to create a bacteria with the fewest genes needed for life. Then he can splice in other genes which will be able to generate energy. His work has the backing of the US Department of Energy.