Pope condemns prospect of human clone

POPE John Paul yesterday condemned the prospect of human cloning as scientists threw doubt on claims by Dr Severino Antinori that a cloned human child will be born in January.

The Italian fertility expert says a patient of his will give birth to a cloned baby early next year but experts, including one who helped create Dolly the sheep, are sceptical.

Dr Severino Antinori told a news conference in Rome on Tuesday that the cloned baby is due in January but refused to elaborate further. “It’s going well. There are no problems,” was all he would say about the pregnancy of the cloned embryo.

He gave no clues about the woman’s identity, age, where and when the embryo was cloned and where she would give birth, nor of two other women he said are carrying cloned embryos.

All he would say was that the cloned foetus was healthy and weighed roughly six pounds.

Other experts in the field have grave doubts.

“It is possible but I am highly sceptical. It is unlikely to be true,” Professor Anne McLaren, of the Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK Institute at the University of Cambridge, said yesterday.

Cloning experts doubt Dr Antinori or his colleagues have the expertise to clone a human.

Although sheep, mice and pigs have been cloned, scientists have not yet produced a carbon copy of any primate.

Experts at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, where Dolly was created, said that without proof it is impossible to know what Dr Antinori has done.

“It is very difficult to know if there is any substance behind these claims at all,” Dr Harry Griffin said when Dr Antinori said a woman in his programme was pregnant in April.

Dr Antinori did not produce any evidence then or now so scientists do not know if he has achieved anything or if he is just seeking publicity.

“We have nothing more to add,” a spokeswoman for the institute said yesterday.

Speaking during his weekly audience in Rome, Pope John Paul II condemned the possibility of human cloning as offensive to God’s plan.

The maverick doctor gained fame nearly a decade ago when he helped a 63-year-old women give birth following fertility treatment with a donated egg. However, he has revealed

few details about his latest project.

Meanwhile, scientists in China say they have cleared two technological hurdles and faces just one more before it can begin cloning the highly endangered giant panda.

Chen Dayuan, the scientist heading the country’s panda-cloning project has reportedly told colleagues. that “only one more problem stands between our country and successful cloning of pandas”.

However, other Chinese scientists said they doubted that the programme was as close as Chen suggested, questioning whether its results could be consistently replicated in a laboratory.

The project, based in a Beijing lab operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been widely criticised by Chinese scientists. They say it is too expensive and say protecting southwest China’s mountain forests is a better way to save the 1,000 pandas left in the wild.