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The Royal Society has submitted a statement on therapeutic cloning to the expert group set up by the Chief Medical Officer to advise the government on issues to do with cloning. The statement discusses the different types of stem cells that exist in embryos and adults, and their potential therapeutic use to repair organ damage resulting from disease or trauma. The Royal Society group recommends that, rather than focusing on the types of stem cells that might be obtained by transplanting a patient's nuclei to enucleated eggs (and thereby running into serious ethical as well as practical difficulties), research should instead be directed towards producing multipotent stem cells by techniques that involved fusing nuclei with the cytoplasm of cells other than eggs. The group stresses, however, that there is as yet no way of knowing whether such an approach would be successful. In the meantime it recommends the establishment of a bank of stem cell types of adult origin; these types of cells, although more restricted in their potential than embryonic cells, could still prove useful in therapeutic applications if problems of host rejection can be overcome.