(Washington Post) Ian Wilmut, who oversaw the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, was granted a license yesterday by British regulators to create cloned human embryos for research. (...) The plan is to make embryos that are clones, or genetic replicas, of patients with a family history of Lou Gehrig's -- a disease whose genetic roots remain largely unknown. Those embryos will be made by taking a single cell from a patient -- such as a skin cell -- and fusing it with a human egg whose own DNA has been removed. When stimulated with electricity or chemicals, the fused cells grow into an embryo genetically identical to the patient. Once extracted from those embryos, the stem cells will be treated in a way that forces them to mature into motor neurons -- the kind of nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to muscles and that mysteriously degenerate in Lou Gehrig's patients.