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  The race to clone a human April 7, 2002 Reporter : Jim Waley  This is the story of the race to clone a human being. The two men who are leading this race — Dr Panos Zavos and Professor Severino Antinori — may be just about to pass the finish line. Prof Antinori has told Sunday for the first time, a woman has been successfully implanted with a cloned human embryo. It is a claim that will dismay and horrify the scientific world. In recent months, evidence has emerged the attempt to clone a human will almost certainly result in tragedy ... a dead or terribly deformed baby. Last March in Rome, Professor Antinori and Dr Zavos announced they would clone a human within the next two years. Antinori is a maverick Italian IVF specialist; Zavos a Cypriot, now based in the United States with a lucrative fertility business. Though both are notorious publicity seekers, each is a brilliant scientist in his own right ... and few doubt they have the technical ability to clone a human. Last October, the final scientific hurdle was crossed. A US company called Advanced Cell Technology successfully cloned several human embryos, allowing them to survive for three days. The embryos grew up to six cells, but the American scientists never intended to implant them into a woman's womb.  The research was not about cloning people but tackling the ravages of disease, like Parkinson's and diabetes. Cells from these patients will be used to create cloned embryos to supply embryonic stem cells. These will be grown into replacement tissues, all perfect matches for the patient. This is therapeutic cloning.What Antinori and Zavos have in mind is something altogether different: human reproductive cloning. As Dr Zavos tells Sunday: "The race is on!" Dr Zavos was born into a poor family in Cyprus before emigrating to the US. He has made millions running fertility clinics ... and at $50,000 a time, could make another fortune from cloning. "If the results come about, this can be very lucrative business, yes," he concedes, "But that’s not why we do this." In the five years since Dolly the sheep became the first ever clone of an adult animal, scientists have cloned mice, cattle, pigs and goats — even a cat named CC. The science that created Dolly, and all the other animals that have followed, is relatively simple in theory. It is the same technique Dr Zavos and Dr Antinori will use to create a human clone.  An egg is taken from the female, and the nucleus removed. Then a cell is taken from the body of the adult who is to be cloned. This can be a scraping of skin, or even a tissue swab from inside the cheek. The DNA is taken from the cell and inserted into the empty egg. An electric shock jumpstarts the process, switching the adult cell back to become the first cell of life. Once the embryo has begun to grow, it is implanted into a woman's womb. The new baby will be an identical genetic copy of the adult who provided the cell. Dr Zavos refuses to say where the procedure will take place. "I mean it will be out there but right now if we let everybody come and share with us … there are thousands of you. I've been to Rome and I had 117 TV crews ... I just bend down to pick up something from the floor and they almost walk all over me. It's a jungle out there, you all want a story to tell to your audience and I can understand that. But we can't share that information with you at this moment." The findings from recent animal cloning experiments are horrific. Scientists have found a disturbing array of deformities never seen in nature. A lamb's kidneys, for example, are shrunken with much of their tissue missing. A cloned lamb's liver is found to be made of strange, unspecialised cells that couldn't function as liver cells. If a human baby born with these kinds of defects were to survive at all, many scientists now believe it would suffer devastating illnesses unknown to medicine. Australian biologist Alan Trounson is one of the pioneers of IVF and now a specialist in stem cell research. He's become one of the leading opponents of human cloning. "I think it's akin to knowing what would happen with Thalidomide, and then go ahead in using it," he says, "I don't think there's any sane medical reason for wanting to attempt this." But Dr Zavos is adamant he can produce healthy human clones. "We are not interested in stepping on dead and deformed babies to accomplish our goals and aspirations," he claims, "I have never been involved in the production of a single, of one single abnormal pregnancy in my lifetime, and I don't intend to start now, at age 58."  Professor Antinori is a man who enjoys notoriety ... but refused to do an interview unless we paid him several thousand dollars. When we declined to pay, Professor Antinori declined to speak.But Prof Antinori has been happy to use defamation laws in a bid to silence his critics. Alan Trounson is one of those who have received a writ for daring to question the Italian professor's abilities. "He's more of a clown than anything else", says Trounson. We finally cornered Professor Antinori outside his clinic. He decided he couldn't pass up an opportunity to blast his Australian nemesis. "I need Dr Trounson to have the good respect with me because it's stupid [for him to say] 'Antinori has no opportunity, no experience to perform cloning' — it's stupid. I was the first in a lot of fields, a lot of publications." For his part, Dr Trounson won't be apologising any time soon. "The community needs the reassurance of people like me — I think that he's wrong and he's got no merit whatsoever." Only a week before, in Kentucky, Dr Zavos flatly denied that the team has impregnated a woman with a cloned embryo. But in Rome, Professor Antinori suggested that was precisely what they have done.  If Antinori is to be believed, a woman, somewhere, has been implanted — but that announcement won't be made until the team is sure the baby is healthy."When the baby is born, a lot of people, [think] the baby maybe die in six months", he explains. "We want to be sure of the good condition of the baby." Nothing, it seems, will stop these two men achieving their goal. Useful websites: Website for The Roslin Institute, the research centre that created the first clone of an adult mammal — Dolly the sheep. www.roslin.ac.uk Monash University's IVF Department website. Leading Australian biologist, Professor Alan Trounson, is the Scientific Director. www.monashivf.edu.au Cloning specialist, Dr Panos Zavos' website. www.zavos.org Website for the Raelian movement, the religious sect joining the race to clone the first human. www.clonaid.com The Human Cloning Foundation: "The official site in support of human cloning." www.humancloning.org The Reproductive Cloning Network: claims to be "a neutral cloning information site", but its patron is Panos Zavos. www.reproductivecloning.net/press.htm Save your cells — or your pet's — for future therapies and reproductive cloning. www.cells4life.net |
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