A country's people can only consume so much alcohol before their collective livers start to fail. That's the lesson in Britain - particularly Scotland - where liver damage is now the fifth most common cause of death.
And unlike the other top causes of death - including cancer and heart disease - liver damage is rising; in the next 10 years, there is predicted to be a 500 per cent increase in demand for liver transplants. But what happens when there aren't enough livers?
The scientist behind modern cloning says the answer may lie in stem cells. In Hong Kong on Friday, Professor Ian Wilmut - the man forever in the science books as the 'father of Dolly', the sheep born in 1996 that was the first ever clone of an adult animal - spoke of research going on in Scotland, where he, an Englishman at the University of Edinburgh, cloned Dolly.
'There's a huge surge of liver damage due to too much alcohol and bad food,' he said. 'But there are ways to help such people without having to do organ transplantation.'
Scientists at the university's Centre for Regenerative Medicine, where Wilmut is director, are trying to use stem cells to produce liver-tissue-like cells for a bio-artificial liver that does not actually go into the patient but is outside the body in a separate system, rather like kidney dialysis.
If a person with cirrhosis is hooked up to this external bio-artificial liver, their blood will pass through the artificial liver cells and their bodies will be cleansed of toxins that way for a few days, taking the stress off their actual livers, which usually perform the detoxification.