APPARENTLY, this Government is 'pro-science'. This is an odd position to strike, as you can't really be for or against science. It's a little bit like saying that on the whole you are 'pro-breathing'.

In general, our attitudes on this matter are confused because science contains the seeds both of our salvation and our doom, or that's the way it seems to me. Mind you, science was never my thing. At school I gave up science at around 13, so I have trouble telling one end of an atom from another.

But I can still spot that when medicine and science come together, human ingenuity is at is cleverest. Many developments of modern medicine, from organ transplants to in vitro fertilisation (IVF), are now everyday miracles, the sort of mundane wonder we take for granted. Yet in their day, these procedures were remarkable, a sign of man pushing against the impossible.

Two stories collided this week, bumping up against one another on the news highway scraping the paint off each other. As research on human embryos garnered headlines, so too did the news that a 56-year-old woman is expecting twins.

On Monday night, the House of Lords gave the go-ahead for scientists to conduct 'essential' research on human embryos. This victory for the science-minded Government came about despite opposition from a cross-party group of peers.

It might be easier to accept the pop-eyed complaints about such research, if only the opponents didn't make such fools of themselves, wilfully mixing science-fiction with science fact, and then falling back on their religious prejudices.

The cloning of human embryos - which is also known as therapeutic cloning - involves research on embryos up to two weeks old, known as stem cells. This process is allowed if it concerns research into, say, fertility or congenital diseases. If therapeutic cloning worked, transplant patients would no longer have to wait for someone else's tissues that their body might reject. Instead, they could have their own tissue cloned to produce a perfect match.

Many degenerative diseases could possibly be cured in this way, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntingdon's Chorea, diabetes and assorted cancers.

Now you might have thought that the prospect of curing such dreadful and debilitating diseases would have been reason enough to accept such research.

But no, that is to forget the Franken-stein factor and the religious element ("We believe that research on cloned human embryos is both immoral and unnecessary," as the Catholic Church butted in, head down as ever). The doubters look at this debate purely under the shadow of human cloning. By this, they imagine an awful world in which the rich and unscrupulous could somehow 'buy' copies of themselves.

Yet such a scenario is so far off as to be almost impossible. Sadly, that doesn't stop the objectors muddling fact and fiction, as if their main source were Frankenstein, which was a novel written in the 19th century, of all the far away places.

Still the lofty likes of Lady Warnock can say that we are rushing "down the slope to the cloning of the whole human being".

Nope, we're not. We're seeing man's ingenuity used to what might be devastatingly good effect. And if that's a slippery slope, I'm all for sliding down it. Such research is for the human good.

Of course, controversy sticks to such issues, like fluff to Velcro. As medical science provides fresh hope, it also summons up new dilemmas. Such as should Lynne Bezant being expecting twins at 56, something which is only possible thanks to IVF?

This strikes me as taking matters a bit far, but where there are limits, there will always be someone standing there and pushing. But twins at that age! Speaking for myself, I think Lynne must be perfectly bonkers.