GENETIC engineers cannot afford to stop at Dolly the cloned sheep, the head of the institute which created her said yesterday.
"We have all the regulations we need to control the technology," Professor Grahame Bulfield, director and chief executive of the Roslin Institute, told a symposium at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, Glos.
"The pace of biological research continues to quicken and people will look back in 100 years and say this was when biology really started as an industry. It is totally science-driven."
There was now the real possibility of a cloning a dairy cow which could lead to ordinary cattle achieving near "elite herd" standards, Prof Bulfield said.
"If we had not done it with a sheep this year somebody else like the Dutch would have done it next year. We are ahead but the lead is minuscule," he said later.
"The genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to stop it."
"The technology works and the knowledge explosion will happen," he said.
"The possibilities are there for both commercial and social benefits and the UK is still in the premier research league."
Meanwhile, the scientist and, Nobel Peace prizewinner Professor Joseph Rotblat said he hoped the development of Dolly would help raise the social conscience of scientists.
The eminent physicist advocated self-regulation and suggested scientists set up an international ethics committee to vet projects and consider the implications.
Prof Rotblat, who worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s and then turned his back on it to campaign for nuclear disarmament, was in Edinburgh to give the opening lecture of the city's International Science Festival. The cloning of Dolly the sheep was carried out by scientists at the Roslin Institute, on the outskirts of the Scottish capital.
"I am not a critic of the work done there," Prof Rotblat said. "In fact, I believe it is an amazing piece of scientific research that, they have done. What I am concerned about is some other aspects of development of the technology of which we know very little."