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The fact that they wanted to fly to Afghanistan does not necessarily mean the Taliban were in on the plan or indeed that they support the hijacking, any more than the spate of hijackings to Cuba in the 1970s proved that Havana was sponsoring terrorism. However, it is more than evident that the hijackers would be amenable to persuasion by the Taliban, and India and the world have every right to expect that the authorities in Kabul will exert all the pressure they can to force the hijackers to abandon their criminal and foolhardy mission without any further loss of life.
The Hindustan TimesA country’s alertness and integrated-response capability are truly tested only in an emergency. After the hostages have been brought home safe and sound, there will be plenty of opportunity to do a post-mortem on each of the stages of the hijacking drama. Even though the US government eventually agreed to classify the Pakistan-based outfit as a terrorist organisation, neither Washington nor any of its allies chose to take the Pakistani government to task for sheltering such a dangerous group on its soil. The present hijacking, in that sense, is a direct outcome of this international permissiveness.

Without knowing how society will choose, predicting is pointless.Tomorrow: David Thomson on 21st-century cinema. The Times of India

It is evident that the hijackers are connected to Harkat-ul-Ansar, the same extremist group that kidnapped and murdered four foreign tourists in Kashmir in 1994. There will be increasingly difficult choices to make, particularly in biology because of its importance in treating disease. Such choices must depend on the clearest understanding of their scientific basis and a proper evaluation of how technologies may protect and enhance human lives. But the main argument used against this work, and which caused the Government to be reluctant to allow human research in this field, is that the use of any embryonic cells may be morally unacceptable to a majority of the public.Surely that attitude is ethically wrong. Embryos at this stage of development perish during IVF and are destroyed by different methods of contraception.

More important, Nature herself destroys many of the embryos that could be used to generate tissues to save countless lives Which harks back to Rabbi Elijah. An understanding of embryology leads to the view that fertilised eggs are not human beings True, they have the potential to be. If the nucleus was from the burnt baby’s own healthy skin, any skin tissue generated would have the huge advantage of being immunologically compatible – it would not be rejected.It has been said that it would require a great number of human embryos to produce a wide variety of tissues That is not true. Rather than delay, we should be trying to help as many dying patients as possible, just as soon as it is technically feasible.So, reproductive science in the next century – indeed all science – will depend largely on society’s evaluation of the ethics of its application. But the moral imperative is surely to save existing life wherever we can. Perhaps that potential may be justifiably directed to saving the lives of existing people.

Once stem cell cultures were established they would be self-replicating, a banked resource, readily available for many treatments. The nucleus from an adult differentiated cell of the desired type could be removed and placed in the embryonic stem cell. With a new command and control centre, that cell could then generate a multitude of cells of the desired type. Thus a baby suffering from 50 per cent burns might be grafted with new skin, all generated from embryonic tissue initially treated with a transplanted nucleus from a tiny sample of skin. The word “cloning” is really a misnomer but it has stuck because the process utilises somewhat similar techniques to those used to produce Dolly the sheep.

Various growth factors can be added to the embryonic cell cultures from mice, but procedures remain hit-and-miss.One tissue-engineering process with considerable potential is so-called therapeutic cloning. One problem is that, though slow progress is being made, we do not fully understand how to direct embryonic stem cells to grow along a particular path of differentiation. The value of liver cells to a patient dying of hepatic failure; neurons to a sufferer crippled by degenerative brain disease; bone marrow to a leukaemia victim; hormone-secreting cells to a severe diabetic; or cardiac muscle for a patient at risk of death after a severe heart attack would be incalculable. That, surely, is why contraception is not regarded as a sin by most Christians in Britain.This Millennium sees us on the brink of an even more important advance. In the first four or five days after fertilisation, cells taken from the embryo could be manipulated so that they develop into embryonic stem cells.