Outrage over human cloning experiments

A team of Italian and US fertility experts vowed last week to go ahead with plans to begin human cloning trials, despite widespread condemnation from scientists, ethicists and religious leaders worldwide. Italian doctor Severino Antinori told a conference in Rome last Friday that he had 600 patients from Italy, America, Japan and other countries who had requested the treatment.

Antinori and his US colleague Panayiotis Zavos plan to use somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) - the technique used to create Dolly the sheep - as a treatment for male infertility. Antinori says that 10 couples will take part in their initial experiments, but has ruled out offering the treatment to single women or couples seeking to replace a dead child. The work is set to begin in October in an unnamed Mediterranean country, as human cloning has been banned in both Italy and the US.

Most cloning scientists feel the project is doomed to failure, given the extremely low success rate of animal cloning experiments, reports New Scientist. Dr Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, has called the plan 'reckless and criminally irresponsible'. Rudolf Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, US, said last week that abnormalities will cause almost all of the first 100 embryo clones to abort. Even those that survive will probably suffer from heart, lung or immune system problems, he added.

The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has restated its opposition to reproductive cloning, saying there were 'lines that should not be crossed'.