Angela McNab, chief executive of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, explained: "women will be allowed to donate their eggs to research, both as an altruistic donor or in conjunction with their own IVF treatment. Given that the medical risks for donating for research are no higher than for treatment, we have concluded that it is not for us to remove a woman's choice of how her donated eggs should be used."

The HFEA stressed that the compensation was tiny, when compared to the effort required to donate. "We need to remind people we are not talking about earnings, we are talking about compensation... comparable to jury service," said a member of the HFEA. It insists that the £250 should not be construed as payment.

Although there has been a lot of publicity lately about the risks of using fertility drugs, the HFEA dismissed these as alarmist. "The risks are incredibly low," said Professor Emily Jackson, another member of the HFEA.

In another development, the director of the lobby group Human Genetics Alert has warned that the government is drafting legislation which could lead to genetic engineering. David King pointed out that the overhaul of the UK's fertility legislation will probably include provisions for genetic alteration of human embryos. A white paper on the topic has already said that that germline modification should be banned -- but only "until such time as safety and efficacy are ensured".

Everyone does it for the money," says Jennifer Dziura, a donor, in an interview with AP. "No one would do that for free; maybe for your sister, but not for a stranger." This is disputed by the president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, Dr David Grainger. He says that non-altruistic donors would not pass a clinic's screening test. However, one woman who later regretted donation told AP that she had convinced herself that she was doing it for altruistic motives. But, she said, "if I'm honest, I did it for financial reasons; I wanted to travel.".

Dr Verfaillie's results proved hard to repeat. Some other scientists were unable even to isolate the cells, called multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPCs). When the magazine New Scientist examined the original paper more closely, it found that some data from her original paper in Nature and another of her papers published at the same time were identical, even though they were supposed to refer to different cells. This led to an investigation by the University of Minnesota, which recently concluded that identification of her cells was "significantly flawed" and that interpretations of her data were potentially incorrect". Dr Verfaillie, who is now at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, has accepted the results of the investigation. It appears that the duplication was an oversight, and that there is no question of falsification.

Curiously, the intensity of public interest caught scientists off guard, even the journal Nature which published Wilmut's research. While the popular media instantly focused on the science fiction scenario of battalions of goosestepping Hitlers, scientists saw Dolly merely as an incremental step forward from a paper published the year before. The cloning debate has since moved on to the pros and cons of therapeutic cloning, ie, cloning and destroying embryos for their stem cells.

Nonetheless, reproductive cloning remains the most potent of the "yuk!" arguments against cloning embryos and no reputable scientist will be caught dead endorsing it. Normally the reason given is that reproductive cloning is bound to be unsafe for the child. Cloned animals, including Dolly, tend to be sickly and deformed.

However, it has also become clear, after ten years, that most scientists working in the field will back human reproductive cloning if it ever becomes safe. Many prominent bioethicists and lawyers have already constructed arguments to justify it. A manifesto released by the world's scientific academies has failed to rule it out.