Cloning: helping the childless or meddling with nature?
They were all dates of revolution in one form or another, formative years in the story of mankind when the path of human development took a quantum leap.
July 5, 1996, is not a date we normally associate with revolution but it should be: it was the day on which Dolly the Sheep was born.
January 2003 will herald another revolution if the cloning programme of Italian fertility specialist Dr Severino Antinori comes to fruition.
According to Dr Antinori, the world's first cloned human will be born in that month. He also says two other women are carrying cloned embryos that are growing normally in the womb.
Many scientists are sceptical of his claim, regarding him as a dangerous maverick who gives orthodox medicine a bad name. If and when the infants are born, it will be amid controversy and fearsome debate coupled with a kind of terrified excitement in the face of such awesome technological advance.
For the first time since Man walked the earth, God will have to take a back seat as His creation makes an exact reproduction of itself, just like a Zerox photocopying machine.
Three years ago, Dr Antinori announced plans to use cloning technology to help infertile couples have children. The technology had been pioneered by British scientists to produce Dolly. Earlier this year, he predicted he would complete the first human cloning operation within 18 months. Now he says he will beat that target.
He was previously best known for his work on in vitro fertilisation, and in particular for enabling women in their 50s and 60s to give birth. He shot to prominence in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old woman to have a baby by implanting a donor's fertilised egg in her uterus, making her the oldest known women in the world to give birth.
Dr Antinori, who runs a fertility clinic in Rome, plans to make his method of human cloning available to couples who cannot have children by any other means for example, when test tube fertilisation is impossible because the man produces no sperm.
"Cloning will help us put an end to so many diseases, give infertile men the chance to have children. We can't miss this opportunity," he says. Genetic material from the father would be injected into an egg, which would then be implanted into the woman's womb to grow.
The resulting child would, in theory, have exactly the same physical characteristics as the father.
Dr Antinori told an Italian newspaper recently more than 1,500 couples had volunteered as candidates for his research programme. He is working in close co-operation with Dr Panos Zavos, an American fertility expert who also operates outside the mainstream of medical and scientific thinking.
Some scientists, including those who cloned Dolly, argue that the process of cloning a human being is not safe and subjects would risk hidden health defects which would emerge only later in life.
Kevin Eggan, a professor at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, believes Dolly the sheep was exceptional and that, in fact, many other cloned animals have damaged or imperfectly copied genes. He fears that if this happened with human cloning, it could result in serious mental problems in people, saying: "Disruption of those genes in humans could cause retardation, amongst other difficulties."
"The truth," says Dr Rudolph Jaeniosch, a colleague of Professor Eggan's, "is that there are between 30,000 and 40,000 genes in the human genome. Any one of them is, in principle, a target for faulty programming in the cloning process. We have no idea how many are adversely affected by it, and there's no way at present to find out. Tiny copying errors could have horrible consequences."
Both Dr Antinori and Dr Zavos dismiss such claims. "This technique is safe," says Dr Zavos while Dr Antinori insists he is "99% sure we will not create monsters".
Dr Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Institute in Scotland which successfully cloned Dolly, describes the success of animal cloning as less than 3% and, as a result, human cloning would be irresponsible. "The risks are too great for the woman and, of course, for the child. Even if it were possible and safe which it is not it would not be in the interest of the child to be a copy of its parent."
Andrew Green of Ireland's National Centre for Genetics agrees. "There are biological, ethical and moral concerns", he says, adding that Dr Antinori is considered a maverick.
Although the practice of human cloning is not specifically banned in Ireland, it has been outlawed by the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.
Scientists are also concerned about the medical risks and uncertainty associated with human cloning. One fear is that if a baby is cloned, its chromosomes could match the age of the donor, meaning a five-year-old would look like a 10-year-old and a 10-year-old would look like a 20-year-old, the stuff of science fiction nightmares.
In 1998, Dr Antinori told the BBC it would be immoral to try to clone humans just for the sake of it, but he now justifies his work as an attempt to help infertile couples.
"Generally, people are against human cloning, and I blame the media for pre-judging it. I want to bring society with me, and persuade people that it is right in rare cases to help infertile couples," he says.
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