IF CLONING a human being were as easy as reproducing a media storm, then Severino Antinori, an Italian doctor, and Panos Zavos, an American researcher, would be masters of their craft. In March, the pair caused a furore in Rome when they announced that they would start cloning a human being by the end of the year. This week, the controversial couple, together with Brigitte Boisselier, the head of Clonaid, the cloning arm of the Raelians (a slightly weird sect), repeated the trick for the cameras at America's National Academy of Sciences.
The academy is supposed to present a report on cloning to Congress in the next month. Dr Antinori says his goal is to tackle male infertility. Genetic material from men who are unable to have children (even with the latest fertilisation techniques) will be put into eggs, and the embryos allowed to develop into babies. Such nuclear transfer produced Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, four years ago. As for Clonaid, its more disturbing ambitions include a plan to clone a dead child.
Just how far the cloners' experiments have progressed is a matter of much speculation. With so many infertile people desperate to have children, money is not the problem. Although one of Clonaid's prospective backers is having second thoughts, both Dr Antinori and Dr Boisselier claim to have enough cash (at least $1m) to clone a person. There are plenty of volunteers willing to donate cells or provide a cosy womb for the cloned creation.
Nor is location much of an obstacle. Shaun Pattinson, a legal expert at Sheffield University, points out that, although governments talk tough on cloning, few have actually banned it. Britain's Parliament, for example, passed a law this year allowing so-called “therapeutic” cloning for the purpose of creating stem cells for research, but it has yet to enact the government's promised ban on reproductive cloning. America must wait to see if the Senate will uphold the recent vote in the House to prohibit all forms of human cloning.
The real hurdle for the cloners is their expertise (or complete lack of it). Even experienced animal cloners need hundreds of egg cells to produce only a handful of live cows or sheep. The difficulty lies, not so much in actually moving nuclei about or manipulating embryos, but in understanding what goes wrong along the way. Problems in gene development lead to high rates of death and deformity in cloned animals, for reasons that scientists scarcely understand and have little means of preventing. Until these problems can be worked out in animals, the road to human cloning could be filled with needless casualties. That prospect should be more than a little troubling for the two doctors.
