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Posted on 10/29/2001 1:20:41 PM PST by Balto_Boy
The controversial Italian doctor who wants to clone a human being has told the BBC he thinks a woman will be pregnant with the first human clone this year. "I think in three or four months there is the first pregnancy," Severino Antinori told BBC Radio 4's Frontiers programme.
Asked whether he would have cloned a human by September 2002, Dr Antinori said: "I hope and I believe."
The cloning of human beings for reproductive purposes is banned in most countries and viewed as dangerous and undesirable by most scientists and doctors.
Imperfect technique
Dr Antinori was suspended from a group of more than a hundred private fertility clinics known as Apart (Association of Private Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinics and Laboratories) earlier in the year.
Apart's president, Wilfried Feichtinger, told BBC News Online at the time that Dr Antinori was facing expulsion, having upset serious scientists and doctors with his comments in the media.
Animal cloning experts warn that cloning is an imperfect technique which produces many failures for each surviving individual.
Dr Antinori says his work is to aid those who cannot normally conceive.
"I want to know why they want to stop people doing this when they cannot have children by sexual reproduction," he told the Frontiers programme.
What part of "98% failure rate and horrible mutations among the survivors" doesn't he understand?
Good to hear that the world is continuing to go about its business "normally".
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But scientifically, it is stupid. You see, there are two DNA types in a cell, the nuclear DNA and the Mitochondrial DNA (which is mainly famous for matching you with female relatives for you out there who are detective story junkies)
In clones, the nuclear DNA doesn't match the mitochondrial DNA. As a result, few clones live to maturity (it took 200 tries to get Dolly), many that are born either die quickly or prematurely age.
In other words, aside from all the embryos he kills trying to make one clone (for egotistical reasons), he also puts the surviving baby at risk
Of course, it may be possible to clone reliabily some day, but should we be bringing cloned babies into the world now when the failure rate is currently so high?
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