Doctor says he is ready to start cloning babies

11:00 am - By JEREMY LAURANCE

The world has been given notice to prepare for the delivery of the first cloned human when an Italian fertility specialist declared he was ready to open a new chapter in human reproduction. The Vatican has attacked the proposal as "grotesque".

Severino Antinori, the gynaecologist who helped a 62-year-old woman have a baby eight years ago, told a conference in Rome yesterday that he had 600 patients from Italy, America, Japan and other countries who wanted the treatment, and 10 couples, including one from America, had volunteered for the first experiment.

The work, which is banned in Italy, was likely to start in October in an unidentified Mediterranean country. A British specialist, Dr Harry Griffin, assistant director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh where Dolly the sheep was cloned, condemned the plan as "reckless and criminally irresponsible" and doubted that it could be achieved.

Professor Antinori, who is to make the attempt with an American scientist, Panayiotis Zavos, mischievously claimed it was Britain's decision in January to approve embryo cloning for research that had encouraged him to make his move.

Other European countries, including Spain and France, have banned human cloning. "For me, Tony Blair's intelligent decision – for that I revere the good help for Tony Blair's decision," he said on BBC radio.

In January, Britain's House of Lords permitted human embryo cloning only to grow stem cells, the body's master cells, for use in the treatment of disease. Replacement of cloned embryos in the womb to produce a baby remains banned.

Professor Antinori told the conference: "Cloning creates ordinary children," adding, "unique individuals, not photocopies of individuals".

He said candidates he had ruled out were single women and couples who want to have another child after the death of other offspring. He had also rejected childless couples advanced in years, but he did not say what his cut-off age was.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reiterated its opposition to "reproductive cloning", saying there were "lines that should not be crossed".

But some British fertility specialists believe the desperation of infertile couples for a baby who is their genetic offspring justifies the use of cloning. A larger group, although opposed, acknowledge it is inevitable, some day.

A survey of 32 leading scientists by The Independent six months ago found more than half said "reproductive cloning" (the creation of a cloned baby) would be attempted within 20 years, if the technical and safety issues could be overcome. One in five said it could be justified on medical grounds, if it was the only way for a couple to have a baby.

The director of a London fertility clinic said: "The equipment needed for cloning is simple and cheap and, whether it is approved or not, it will happen. It is unstoppable."

But Dr Harry Griffin of the Roslin Institute said there were immense technical difficulties and dangers in any attempt. Scientists had tried 277 times before producing Dolly the sheep. And in the two years since a team of scientists in Hawaii succeeded in cloning mice only three laboratories around the world had managed to repeat their success.

Among those animals that had been cloned, almost half were born deformed, died in the womb or shortly after birth. "A small number of specialists in the IVF community think that because they have expertise in the laboratory techniques they can do it," Dr Griffin said.

"But besides manual dexterity, you need green fingers and some insight. I don't think Professor Antinori understands what is involved at the molecular level."

The creation of a cloned baby, as planned by Professor Antinori, would involve taking a cell from the skin on the back of the man's hand, extracting its nucleus and injecting it into an egg from the woman whose own nucleus had been removed.

The resulting baby would be an identical copy of its father but have no genes from its mother. This technique is similar to ICSI (intra-cytoplasm sperm inject- ion), a treatment for infertility in men, in which a single sperm is injected into the egg.

The difference is that the sperm's nucleus fuses with the egg's nucleus to create an embryo with genes from both parents.

The process of transferring the cell nuclei is the easy bit. Getting the genes in the nucleus from the man's skin cell to "switch on" inside the egg and behave like the genes in thenucleus of a sperm cell is more difficult. A sperm cell is programmed to grow and develop into an embryo, an adult cell is not.

"You are trying to reset all the genes in the adult cell – some of which may have been silent for 30 or 40 years depending on the age of the man – and make sure they perform and switch on and off at the appropriate time," Dr Griffin said.

"It is a bit like getting an orchestra to play without missing a note after it has been asleep for 30 years."

If any of the genes failed to function in the right way, that would affect the development of the embryo. It might fail to implant in the womb, or the lungs might be immature and fail to inflate properly at birth or there could be a heart problem.

"We don't know what we are doing with cloning yet," he added. "There is abundant evidence from animals that it would not be safe in humans. It is being reckless and criminally irresponsible to attempt it."