Italian doctor says first human clone will be born by Christmas

CONTROVERSIAL Italian doctor Severino Antinori claimed yesterday, that the world's first human created

He told the French newspaper Liberation that 50 couples unable to conceive because of male infertility had volunteered for his cloning programme.

"I transferred 18 embryos created by cloning, and I obtained one pregnancy," he said. "The foetus has a good morphology (shape)."

With the embryo created by using tissue from the father, the child will presumably be his genetic duplicate, and his twin, if male.

Antinori refused to divulge the identity of the parents, saying only that the baby would not be born in Italy.

The doctor has frequently courted controversy he helped a 62-year-old woman become the world's oldest mother.

At a medical conference in Rome last year, he declared that he would clone a human being within a year.

Researchers have since warned that humans born of cloning would suffer from a number of physical abnormalities, including fatty livers, under-developed lungs and a defective immune system.