A Glint in Daddy's Dead Arm

It is being billed as a major breakthrough that could lead to the end of male infertility. It is also a step being taken by medical science that opens many more doors to abuse than it ever would to benefit.

Professor Karim Nayernia has created the chemicals and process through which stem cells can be transformed into sperm cells.

The stem cells used were taken from embryos in the first days of life but the professor hopes to repeat his success with skin cells taken from a man's arm. These would first be exposed to a mixture that wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm.

Using IVF techniques, the artificial sperm could be injected into eggs, allowing men who do not produce sperm to father children of their own.

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But the researcher also acknowledged that the technique could potentially be applied to skin cells taken from men who have been dead for many years, allowing them to 'father' children.

Not to be too dramatic, but could parentless children be created for the purpose of medical experimentation? Could tinpot dictators resupply their armies with thousands of parentless wards of the state for the sole purpose of carrying a rifle? Could grieving wives or parents try and replace their loved ones with the fruit of harvested skin cells in something strangely reminiscent of Pet Semetary. Nah, never happen.

In the absence of any of those crazy potential scenarios, we already have this unsettling one:

Josephine Quintavalle, of campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: 'To take a viable human embryo and destroy it in a bid to create dodgy sperm to create a not-so-healthy embryo is experimentation for experimentation's sake.

The impractical among us might have said the same thing about Mengele.