ITALY: Has an Italian fertility doctor managed to produce the first human clone? We won't know before January, writes Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor
No evidence has been produced so far about whether the world's first human clones are about to be born. The Italian fertility doctor who claims to have assisted three pregnancies involving clones has offered no details and no proof.
Dr Severino Antinori wouldn't say where the preparatory work was done, where the women lived, how the cloning was achieved nor in what country the women lived.
He also contradicted some of his own claims, having stated last April that he knew of three pregnancies which were under way. At least one baby should have been delivered by mid-November and not in January, as he now states.
He did not clarify his role in the pregnancies other than to say he had provided a "cultural and scientific contribution" to a group of other scientists. Experts over the months have generally dismissed Dr Antinori's claims, however, and do not believe he is capable of achieving a cloned pregnancy.
The acid test will only come in January and the question now is whether Dr Antinori will submit to it. The only way to confirm that the newborn is a clone will be to take blood or tissue samples from the baby and from the donor of the cell which allegedly produced the clone. Only with a perfect match will we know whether a new type of human has arrived.
This genetic test was the technique used to confirm the clone status of Dolly the sheep. Dr Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh made history in 1996 with the arrival of Dolly.
He has repeatedly argued strongly against any attempt to clone a human. "You have to be sick to suggest it," he stated during a lecture he gave in Dublin two years ago. He repeated this view earlier this year after Dr Antinori's announcement.
The ethical and moral questions were not Dr Wilmut's only concerns. Cloning involves taking a healthy egg cell from a woman, removing its nucleus and replacing this with a cell nucleus from a donor. The donor could be a prospective parent unable to have children any other way, or morbidly, a could be retained cell taken from a dead child or loved one.
When Dolly was cloned it took 277 tries before she was delivered. This extremely low success rate makes it improbable that three human pregnancies could be achieved unless there were hundreds of women donating eggs to the venture and plenty of surrogate mothers.
Dr Wilmut also warned that many of the efforts towards Dolly ended in malformed animals and earlier this year he reported that Dolly had developed arthritis despite her relative youth.
"There is no way of knowing if this is down to cloning or whether it is a coincidence," he said. He and other researchers discovered early on however that Dolly had genes carrying the signs of being from an older animal rather than a newborn.
For Dr Antinori and his colleagues, being first in human cloning may not be a cause for celebration.