Welcome to this first edition of pH7, the Parliamentary Health Magazine. Examining all of the critical health-related topics of the day, we hope to become an essential arena in which MPs, peers and the wider health service community can debate public policy issues. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who lent their support, and enthusiasm, to the making of this magazine - particularly to Dr Ian Gibson MP, who has very kindly agreed to chair our editorial board. In this issue we have a special supplement on schizophrenia - a distressing illness which affects one in 100 of the adult population. We have also chosen to focus on the House of Lords Select Committee on Stem Cell Research's controversial decision to allow the go-ahead of limited therapeutic cloning of human embryos. Balancing a difficult ethical judgement on the fundamental question of what constitutes human life whilst acknowledging the desires of many sick people and their loved-ones who hope for a cure for their suffering, this decision was always going to arouse great passions. And with the news that China is to pass legislation that will make it the most deregulated state in the world for bio-technology, the world is watching in hope that we will not see ethical considerations sacrificed in a race to clone the first human being.