Cloned baby ‘due in January’

THE world’s first ever cloned infant will be born in January 2003, according to controversial Italian fertility expert Severino Antinori.

The gynaecologist said the child was in the 33rd week of gestation and weighed an estimated 5.5 pounds, but he refused to say where the infant will be born.

Earlier this year, Antinori announced that human cloning programmes were under way in Russia and China, distant from the raging moral debate in the west.

Three years ago, Dr Antinori announced plans to use cloning technology to help infertile couples have children. The technology was pioneered by British scientists to produce Dolly the sheep, the world's first vertebrate clone made from an adult mammalian cell.

The Italian medic has long boasted he would be behind the first human cloning operation.

The 56-year-old Dr Antinori was previously best known for his work in 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 woman 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, he also argues, will help put an end to so many diseases and give infertile men the chance to have children.

Genetic material from the father of the New Year baby was injected into an egg, which was then implanted into the woman's womb to grow.

The resulting child will, in theory, have exactly the same physical characteristics as the father.

Dr Antinori said that more than 1,500 couples had volunteered as candidates for his research programme.

He has faced scepticism from the scientific community, many of whom believe it is impossible to successfully clone a human being.

Some scientists argue that the process is not safe and that subjects would risk hidden health defects which would emerge only later in life.

He also faces the outrage of those who oppose the procedure on ethical and moral grounds. The practice of human cloning is banned in Europe and formal legislation has gone through Congress in the United States. Dr Antinori proposed carrying out the procedure in an unnamed Mediterranean country, or on a boat in international waters.