As UK scientist Ian Wilmut received Germany's top medical research award Monday in Frankfurt, more than two dozen protestors gathered outside the ceremony was held to voice disapproval, asserting that Wilmut's cloning research would be illegal in Germany.
The protestors were just a small indicator of the furor created by Wilmut's arrival in Germany to accept the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for 2005, which is associated with Frankfurt University and carries a cash award of €100,000 (USD $132,000).
Wilmut, whose groundbreaking research at Scotland's Roslin Institute led to the birth of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, was also the target of headline-generating criticism from politicians, church groups, a major medical organization and even, indirectly, Germany's leading research funding organization, the German Research Foundation (DFG).
While the United Kingdom allows therapeutic cloning and production of human embryos for research, Germany's law, adopted in 2002 after much ...
