A radio report this morning informed us that women may now be able to give birth without the intervention — direct or indirect — of men. Seems that scientists believe that they can now generate a very weak form of sperm from a woman's bone marrow. This can be used to fertilize the woman's eggs. No males need apply.
Of course, the genetic material in the sperm would be identical to that in the egg, and the result would be — whisper the word! — a clone of the woman in question. But the horrible, horrible C-word was not used in the radio report, which simply pointed out that the resulting offspring would, of necessity, be female, since the male Y-chromosome would be missing.
Is this going to be a way of getting around the clone-ban that "ethical" geneticists have attempted to introduce into the question of genetic engineering?