Italian Promises Cloned Human Baby in January

The Italian fertility expert Severino Antinori once again put himself at the centre of a storm yesterday when he predicted that an unidentified woman would give birth to a cloned baby in the first week of January.

In the six years since the announcement of the birth of Dolly the sheep - the first mammal to be cloned from an adult donor cell - there have been repeated claims by individuals that they intended to clone humans. Among them, only Dr Antinori has a record of successful fertility treatments from his base in Rome.

He also has a record of controversy. Several years ago, he triggered another media uproar by helping a 62-year-old woman to bear a child. But experts remained sceptical yesterday about claims of a cloned human baby.

Dr Antinori would give no details. "It's going well. There are no problems," was all he would say. He told a news conference on Tuesday that he was not in charge of the cloning project but had made a "scientific and cultural contribution".

He has made similar claims before. In April he announced that three women were pregnant with embryo clones, but then provided no further information.

Human cloning is outlawed in Britain where the general technique was pioneered. Around the world, there have been successful cloning experiments with mice, sheep, cows, pigs and cats but in each case researchers have prepared a huge number of embryos only to produce a much smaller number of pregnancies which resulted in a yet smaller number of successful births. Dr Antinori and his colleagues have published no studies of their own experience in cloning mammals. Those who have published studies have all agreed that attempts to clone a human would be immoral and dangerous.

"There are huge safety problems with cloned animals, let alone the ethical problems," Suzi Leather, head of Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology authority told television news yesterday.

"Most of them fail. Even the ones that do come to term as live births have massive problems. We want to know why any woman in possession of the facts would have agreed to take part in a human experiment."

Jacques Cohen, a spokesman for an assisted reproduction centre in Livingston, New Jersey, told the New York Times: "Why be so secretive about this if it is truthful?"