Three vow to plough ahead with cloning

Last week, in the austere surroundings of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, three would-be human cloners met the wrath of the scientific establishment. With the world's media watching, Severino Antinori, Panos Zavos and Brigitte Boisselier faced a barrage of questions about their respective plans to produce the first ever cloned baby.

Whilst Boisselier, of Clonaid, claimed she had started research on the creation of cloned embryos, Antinori and Zavos said they had not started cloning yet. They plan to do so later this year. Scientists at the conference expressed frustration that the three are working in secret and have published nothing on their intentions or their arguments for being allowed to proceed.

Accused of putting patients and babies at risk of death or severe birth defects, Antinori and Zavos claimed that they will be able to screen out damaged embryos. But embryologists at the meeting argued that there are no known methods for testing embryos for such abnormalities. 'At present there is no way to predict whether a given clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual,' said Rudolf Jaenisch, professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.