First cloned baby due in January

An Italian doctor has recently announced that the first cloned human baby will be born in early in January 2003. The Italian fertility expert Dr. Severino Antinori, who made world headlines in 1994 when he helped a 62-year-old woman have a child, supports the cloning of human beings as a way for infertile couples to have children. Dr. Antinori would give no further details and said that it was going on well, there were no problems, and he was not in charge of the cloning project but had made a scientific and cultural contribution. His cloning experiments, which involve using fetus that have an 85 per cent genetic heritage from their father and the remaining 15 per cent from their mother, would be used to treat male infertility. He would not reveal the location or nationality of the woman, but said ultra-sound scans showed the foetus currently weighed 2.5 to 2.7 kg and was absolutely healthy. In the month of April he announced that three women were pregnant with clones, one in her tenth week, one in her seventh and one in her sixth. He declined to say where any of the trio were, disclosing only that one lived in an Islamic nation. He did not specify if the woman he said was due to give birth in January was one of the three he had spoken of earlier. Around the world, there have been successful cloning experiments with mice, sheep, cows, pigs and cats but in each case researchers have prepared a huge number of embryos only to produce a much smaller number of pregnancies which resulted in a yet smaller number of successful births. Dr. Antinori and his colleagues have published no studies of their own experience in cloning mammals. Those who have published studies have all agreed that attempts at human cloning would be immoral and dangerous. There are questions about viability and good health with cloned animals, let alone the ethical problems and most of them fail. Even the ones that do come to term as live many health problems. The international scientific community expressed scepticism over claims by the controversial fertility expert and termed them irresponsible, saying the risk of creating deformed or sick babies is too great and that it poses unanswerable ethical dilemmas. No judgements can be made until scientific evidence is produced.