Cloned baby factory 'in two years'

By ANNE BESTON and AGENCIES

"The genie is out of the bottle."

With those words, an American doctor announced that he and an Italian colleague plan to clone babies. Childless couples are already being selected for the project.

A human clone, the much-feared, much-talked-about leap forward for science and medicine, is only a matter of time.

The weekend declaration prompted renewed calls for legislation outlawing human cloning and controversy about the ethical dilemmas in New Zealand and around the world.

Professor Severino Antinori, who has already helped two post-menopausal women to give birth, said in Rome that his team aimed to have the first cloned embryo ready for implantation in the mother's womb within two years.

His colleague, Professor Panos Zavos, who resigned his post at Kentucky University to help to lead the cloning effort, said: "The genie is out of the bottle. Dolly [the world's first cloned animal, a sheep] is here, and we are next."

The technique used to clone a child would resemble that used to clone animals such as Dolly.

The team said it planned to produce the babies in a Mediterranean country. Italian news agency ANSA quoted Professor Antinori as saying it would "very probably" be Israel. The German news magazine Der Spiegel said the venue would be Caesarea, an Israeli coastal resort.

As reproductive techniques become increasingly sophisticated, world Governments are having to wrestle with the moral and ethical questions raised by cell research.

While fertility specialists and scientists in New Zealand believe it is only a matter of time before a cloned human being is produced, they do not see any urgency to bring in laws on cloning here.

"People keep on saying they are going to do it so I suppose they will find a way to do it without being harassed, but I can't imagine anyone in New Zealand would try to clone a human being," said Professor George Petersen, president of New Zealand's top science body, the Royal Society, and emeritus professor of biochemistry at Otago University.

Professor Petersen said Dolly the sheep, produced by the Roslin Institute in Scotland, was already ageing prematurely and researchers would theoretically have to produce "hundreds of Dollys" in human form to get a normal child.

Dr Richard Fisher, director of Auckland's Fertility Associates, called Professor Antinori the "Gaddafi of science" and said the project was a "ridiculous attempt to be first."

"It is a community debate that needs to be had, but of the five places in New Zealand that could even contemplate it, none would have the faintest desire to clone."

He said the community would have to decide whether it was wise to pursue cloning of humans, but he believed most countries would decide it was not appropriate.

Technically, cloning is not illegal in this country but would require permission from the Government's ethics watchdog, the National Ethics Committee on Human Assisted Reproduction.

Hamilton Labour list MP Dianne Yates said the committee had "no teeth" and no budget to follow up any of its recommendations.

"They give advice and they give opinions, but there is no redress through that committee."

Ms Yates wants her bill outlawing cloning to become law this year. Called the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, it is before the parliamentary health select committee.

Rosemary De Luca, chairwoman of the National Ethics Committee on Human Assisted Reproduction, said any application by a New Zealand organisation to clone a human being would almost certainly be turned down, but she admitted that the committee had no statutory powers.

Professor Petersen said one of the issues New Zealanders would have to confront was whether any legislation allowed for continued research on human embryos using stem cells.

Stem cells, which are derived from the earliest stages of an embryo, can replicate indefinitely to develop specialised tissue such as livers or hearts in the laboratory.

Such research has been touted by medical researchers as the answer to human health problems such as liver cancer because stem cells taken from an individual can in theory be grown to replace diseased organs. In Britain, MPs voted late last year to allow research on stem cells in embryos up to 14 days old.

Professor Petersen said a key issue with stem cells was how long you allowed the cells to "differentiate" or develop. After about 14 days they began to divide into organs and become a recognisable foetus.