Cloned baby ‘to be born next month in Belgrade’

THE world’s first cloned ba

The Italian gynaecologist behind the project made the claim in an interview.

Severino Antinori has been denounced by most other leading scientists for his efforts to create the first human clone.

"When the time comes, you will be informed about the birth and the family," said the doctor, who was attending a seminar on sterilisation and artificial insemination in the Yugoslav capital.

He told a Belgrade newspaper: "I think we have made a revolution in the field of genetics and Serbia will be one of three countries which will go down in history."

The newspaper, Nin, said it had followed Dr Antinori to a private Belgrade artificial insemination clinic.

The doctor declined to confirm if the cloned baby would be born at the Papic clinic.

Last month, Dr Antinori said the male baby was healthy and had "more than a 90% chance" of being born.

The doctor, who first announced the cloned pregnancies in April, insisted he had not carried out the procedure himself, and that his involvement was merely "cultural and scientific".

Dr Antinori, 57, shot to notoriety in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old Italian woman become pregnant through fertilisation treatment administered at his clinic in Rome.

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 the sheep, the world's first vertebrate clone made from an adult mammalian cell.

Earlier this year, Dr Antinori predicted that he would complete the first human cloning operation within 18 months.

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," Dr Severino Antinori said.

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.

However, experience with the five mammal species that have been cloned so far would indicates Antinori has almost no chance of success.

The vast majority of pregnancies involving clones have gone very badly. In most of them, the clone has died and in almost all of them put the lives of the mother at risk. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal clone, was the one success in 247 pregnancies.