Because in many ways the future feels further away than ever.Certainly we in the West can dream of perfect control over our health – we can listen to the tales of dazzling experiments resulting in cloned animals and the possibility of breakthroughs that might, one day, make paraplegics walk again and give brain connections back to Ronald Reagan. We can fantasise that we might become a perfect race, each of us taken through a life of absolutely predictable health from a managed birth to a far-off, pain-free trip to the grave.If you buy into that dream, the Lords’ decision yesterday to allow research using cells from cloned embryos is just part and parcel of a great story of progress. The few religious reactionaries who don’t like it will be wheeled around from GMTV to Newsnight, but most people will see it as an unstoppable part of our triumphant battle to control our health. As Robert Lanza, the vice-president of medical and scientific development at ACT, said after his company cloned the first human embryo in the US last year.

“Our intention is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to make lifesaving therapies for a wide range of human disease conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, Aids.” How can one argue with that?One can’t. But look again at the diseases that he said that cloned-embryo cell research is now expected to deal with: diabetes, strokes, cancer, Aids. And then look at some of the other health stories to have hit the headlines.The story that, for instance, one in four five-year-old girls is showing early signs of diabetes due to the increase in childhood obesity. Or that a form of diabetes, previously known to affect only overweight adults, is now being identified in children as young as 13 because of their poor diets and lack of exercise. Or that the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, is rising steeply because young people refuse to wear condoms. Or that deaths from alcohol-related car crashes rose sharply last year. Or that young girls and boys are becoming increasingly heavy drinkers.

Or that smoking has increased among people aged from 16 to 19.This is where the dream of total control falls down – not in the achievements of scientists, but in the messy reality of our lives. What do we really want? We may think we want perfect health, a life lived in absolute control. And when we make rational choices for ourselves or for others, of course that’s what we choose. But then we pour another glass to take the evening into a lovely haze, we strap ourselves into steel cages and roar around the country at 90 miles an hour, or we ride a wave of urgent passion without even remembering that packet of condoms sitting in the bathroom cabinet. Of course we do!For all the trendy talk of holistic health care, what most people in the West want is the opposite – they want to eat what they like and do what they like and still live as long as they want. That’s why the reality of our lives so often falls so far short of the dreams of both science and science fiction. Neither takes account of the messy irrationality of human desires – desires that seem to get even more messy and irrational, as our theoretical ability to control our lives increases.Nor, of course, does the dream of total control take any account of the unspeakable inequalities in the world.

Because it beggars belief that, while we have worked out how to save a baby in America from her own genetic heritage, we still haven’t worked out how to save babies in other countries from dying of drinking dirty water.That’s not to say that the scientists are on the wrong track. Surely they are just doing what scientists do – expanding our knowledge and spelling out the secrets of life, day by day. But perhaps we should put their glittering achievements into perspective. Because, although scientists might one day be able to save us even from our genes, they still won’t be able to save us from ourselves.n.walter btinternet . Let me declare a non-interest. I do not know Sue MacGregor; I do not recall ever meeting her; and I do not want her job: rising daily at 3am is not something I would choose to do, even for an agreeable salary

Let me declare a non-interest. And after the past month or so of continual media send-offs – the pre-memoirs, the serialisation, the memoirs themselves, the interviews and the expos?that were not really expos?– I feel I know Ms MacGregor a little too well.Few Radio 4 listeners can have emerged from the last few weeks without understanding that Ms MacGregor (let’s just call her Sue, shall we?) is a national treasure.