Story of Human Cloning Attempt Unconfirmed

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, April 11, 2002

Story of Human Cloning Attempt Unconfirmed

Widely publicized reports of a woman pregnant with a human clone are extremely dubious, says the former partner of the physician linked to the report.

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Widely publicized reports of a woman pregnant with a human clone are extremely dubious, says the former partner of the physician linked to the report.

Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori has been the subject of swirling rumors in the past week after claims that he succeeded in implanting a cloned human embryo in a woman under his care surfaced in a story in a United Arab Emirates newspaper. According to the story, she is eight weeks pregnant.

But Antinori's former partner, Panos Zavos of the Andrology Institute in Lexington, Ky., says he cut medical links with Antinori at least five months ago and is extremely doubtful that the Italian physician could have pulled off a cloning attempt independently.

Zavos and Antinori have called for adding cloning of humans to the array of allowed fertility treatments. They have expressed their views at National Academy of Sciences events and other scientific meetings.

Zavos says Antinori is "not the right man to try this." Although he has ended the partnership, Zavos says he talked weekly with Antinori before the rumor and there was no mention of the pregnancy.

Zavos confirms that he himself plans to attempt cloning of a human being in about 10 couples this summer. He says he has received 5,535 inquiries from couples interested in cloned children.

Attempts to gain confirmation or denial of the rumor from Antinori have been answered by a non-committal e-mail response from his institute in Rome: "There is no answer to your question."

"Together or apart, there is no reason to believe either one of these individuals can achieve human cloning," says Sean Tipton of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Neither one has published any studies on cloning techniques, he notes. Accomplished embryo researchers have reported only limited success with the technology.

Researchers warn that in animals, numerous spontaneous abortions accompanied each successful cloning attempt. Cloning the sheep Dolly took more than 200 tries, and a cat required more than 80 attempts. Some research suggests that clones might age faster and suffer more ill health compared with normal births. The Food and Drug Administration requires approval for any attempts to clone a human baby in the USA; so far, no one has gained approval.

In a speech at the White House on Wednesday, President Bush is expected to ask the Senate to pass legislation that would ban all human cloning experiments.

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