It's a Hollywood creation - part actual research, development, and science, and part movie.

Human cloning is the deliberate creation of a human life for utilitarian purposes. That life is created simply for research or for the benefit of another. Any time in history when we have subjected one class of human beings to enslavement by another class has been wrong.

As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.

He chuckled rather heartily at my naiveté. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while.'

And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?'

'Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it.

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

Academic research is supposed to be peer-reviewed, with the idea being that the best science wins out. But with earmarks, quality has nothing to do with it. Schools get research funds simply because they are in a powerful member's district or have the money to hire a lobbyist.

Before discovering theater, I was sloughing off and didn't have any passion for school. Then I couldn't get enough. All of a sudden, I was getting good parts in all of these plays. I just loved it. I started getting A's in acting, directing and technical theater. I found something that clicked.