After much debate and psychological anguish, the film Der Untergang (The Downfall) was released last week in Germany. It tells the story of the last 12 days of Hitler's life, before his suicide in April 1945. In portraying Hitler as a human being rather than a one-dimensional caricature, the film breaks a 60-year taboo, and is a measure of the evolution in Germany's attitudes to its past.

Other attitudes shaped by the Nazi period have evolved even more slowly. Last week saw the release of a report on human cloning by the influential German National Ethics Council. Its cautious tone illustrates how slow has been the evolution of attitudes towards the sanctity of life, which have been so deeply influenced by the Nazi abuse of genetics. In no other Western country is the spectrum of attitudes towards cloning so narrow, and so skewed towards conservatism.

No taboo has been broken in the report. The 25 council members, who include theologians, physicians and scientists, unanimously called for a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning. But they declined to take a vote on cloning for research purposes, going only as far as to say whether, as individuals, they supported a general ban, a temporary ban or limited approval. The German government, which established the council three years ago, was quick to jump on the general recommendation of a temporary continuation of the existing ban.

The same cautious approach was responsible for Germany's long delay in allowing any form of genetic engineering, and its late entry to the international Human Genome Project. Since then there has been pressure to catch up. It is historically understandable that Germany holds back on any work involving human embryos, but, given the increasingly clear potential of therapeutic cloning and work on human embryonic stem cells, it is important for small steps to be taken.

One such step would be for Germany to relax its rules on the use of cultured human embryonic stem-cell lines. At present, German scientists may not work on cell lines created after 2002, when the rules were fixed. However, older cell lines are of limited use in research. The European Union's Sixth Framework Programme funds research on new cultured lines, and there are German researchers who want to take part in such projects. The country will one day want to enter this field, as it did in genomics. When it does, expertise needs to be on hand.