After the surgery, the rhesus monkeys became "pugnacious," recalls Dr. Robert J. White, professor of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.

Well, who could blame them? The animals had gone to sleep as complete beings and had woken up paralyzed and insensate from the neck down. Their heads were attached by clamps and sutures to new bodies over which they had no control. They could only see, hear, smell, taste--and bite. According to White, if your finger came anywhere close to their mouths, you could easily lose it.

Although the experiments were done in the '60s and '70s, White says that the time is now right to offer what he calls a "full-body transplant" to humans. He has been featured on ABC News and in the New York Times discussing the possibility. With present technology, nerves could not be reconnected, so a new body wouldn't offer feeling or movement; but it could prolong the lives of quadriplegics, most of whom presently die of organ rather than brain failure.

White is not just some mad scientist with crazy ideas. The monkey research was originally published in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. In addition to his post at Case Western, he is director of neurosurgery and the Brain Research Laboratory at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, and the author of 700 papers.

"Christopher Reeve, Steven Hawking, these people are sustained by their hearts and other organs, but they can't move, they can't feel," he says. "Right now, they are the equivalent of a head. And Mr. Hawking's body might fail, it might become susceptible to infections, which could kill him. The issue comes up, is he entitled to a transplant? We say it's OK for a liver, why not a whole body?"

Like many medical techniques that start being used for the sickest and most desperate patients, this one has frightening implications. For example, eventually some scientists believe they will be able to reconnect the nerves and offer feeling and motion.

Could full-body transplants become a macabre fountain of youth, offering people a chance at near immortality as they continually replace old bodies with new, younger ones? Will headless bodies be cloned as replacements, or would people need other sources of donors? Could this offer a bizarre new way to get a sex change? And what does it say about identity, humanity and the soul?

The cloning of humans came a step closer with the announcement that scientists have succeeded in cloning mice. The similarity between the genetic machinery of mice and humans means that the development at the University of Hawaii paves the way for the successful cloning of humans.

Dr. Patrick Dixon, author of The Genetic Revolution, called for urgent international talks to discuss the moral issues. Dr. Dixon, considered a leading authority on the ethics of cloning, said: "[This] was a huge step forward in cloning techniques that brings much closer the day when we will be able to produce low-cost cloning for any mammals, humans included."

Neal First, of the University of Wisconsin, said: "There is not a single reason why it wouldn't work in humans." The Hawaii scientists have even made clones of the cloned mice. They can create up to 200 clones a day.

A Chicago physicist has renewed his plans to clone humans, saying he will be the first in line. Richard Seed said, "I have decided to clone myself first to defuse the criticism that I'm taking advantage of desperate women with a procedure that's not proven."

The 69-year-old scientist, who worked in fertility research in the 1980s, said in January that he wanted to replicate humans. Speaking before a meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences in Boston, Seed said clones would be "fun," and a step toward immortality.

An American millionaire has reportedly paid $5 million for a clone of his pet dog. The anonymous Texan tycoon has engaged the cloning expert Dr. Mark Westhusin--Director of Cloning at Texas A&M University--to create an exact replica of his beloved Alsatian-Border Collie cross called Missy.

Dr. Westhusin, who has temporarily broken off his research in order to concentrate on cloning Missy, suggested that pet cloning is a growth industry. Lee Silver, Professor of Genetics at Princeton University, believes Dr. Westhusin's research brings scientists closer to cloning people. "The incredible thing is that if you can perfect the technology in lots of different animals it makes it that much more likely it's going to move to human beings," he said.

In the eerie light that shines through the X-ray, William Haseltine dreams. He likes what he sees. This is it. Further proof that healthy genes can help the human body repair itself. That such genes can be identified and then reproduced countless times. That the world will someday know he's not a money-mad, social-climbing, beaker-brandishing lunatic in a lab coat. And that his creation, Human Genome Sciences in Rockville, Maryland, could become a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company in the century soon to come.

The X-ray in question shows the lower leg of a 61-year-old woman. The limb is a mess. The three main arteries that carry blood into the leg are missing. Vanished. Kaput. Fatty acids choked the blood flow; the arteries withered away. So did the smaller blood vessels that depended on the arteries.

Posted on a light box at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston, the film portrays a large solid-black mass with no crisscrossing lines. Next to it, on the right, is another X-ray of the same leg after 12 weeks of treatment using healthy genes, the kind Haseltine can concoct in his lab. The leg is alive. Vessels loop, swoop and swirl.

Haseltine is cutting deals around the world with folks who believe that the 21st century will see the dawn of a new age, folks who are betting everything that gene-based drugs will be able to cure diseases, heal wounds, restore lost hair and Lord knows what else, folks who will buy the genes they need from Haseltine's labs.

Haseltine says he wants to cure diseases and make lots of money. And, he is asked, is he playing God? "I wish we were," he says. "We're ushering in a new era of regenerative medicine. The future of medicine is human proteins and human genes."

And Haseltine believes he is the one person who can grasp the omnipotent power, the burning glory of gene-based drugs. He believes he is the one chosen to lead humankind into the promised land.

"I'm not religious," he says. "I'm philosophical. If there is a God, He's not interested in man. So what difference does it make?" As a result, he adds, man must take matters into his own hands.

LONDON -- British scientists have created a frog embryo without a head, a technique that may lead to the production of headless human clones to grow organs and tissue for transplant, The Sunday Times reported.

The paper said people needing transplants could have organs "grown to order" from their own cloned cells. Growing partial embryos to cultivate customized organs could bypass legal restrictions and ethical concerns, because without a brain or central nervous system, the organisms may not technically qualify as embryos.

"You could genetically reprogram the embryo to suppress growth in all the parts of the body except the bits you want, plus a heart and blood circulation," said embryologist Jonathan Slack, professor at Bath University.