Scientists at war over human cloning

Scientists and doctors argued publicly today over whether cloning is a sound science or an error-prone process that could produce abnormal embryos.

‘‘At present there is no way to predict whether a given clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual,’’ Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told a National Academy of Sciences panel on human cloning in Washington.

Controversial Rome doctor Severino Antinori said that during his years of work in fertility clinics, he has developed methods to screen out abnormal embryos.

‘‘There is no way to do this,’’ Jaenisch responded, saying even apparently normal animal clones may have abnormalities too subtle to detect at that stage.

In some cases embryos grow abnormally large, Jaenisch said. Others have abnormal placentas or suffer respiratory problems or heart and circulatory abnormalities.

Alan Colman, research director of PPL Therapeutics in Scotland, told the panel that cloning in animals is improving and he expects much greater efficiency as techniques get better.

‘‘The bottom line is practice makes perfect. But is it ethical to practice in humans? I think it isn’t,’’ he said.

Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a professor at the University of Hawaii, said cloned animals are likely to harbour defective genes that are not apparent early on and this weighs against cloning humans.

Brigitte Boisselier, a cloning advocate, responded: ‘‘When you say some genes are likely to harbour defects and use that to say we shouldn’t go on, we all know that in our bodies there are genes that may have defects’’ and will cause problems later in life.

Since the day in 1997 that scientists in Scotland announced the successful cloning of a sheep named Dolly, the fear of or hope for human cloning has been a major focus of discussion and of legislation in many countries banning the practice.

Citing widespread confusion about human cloning and the complex ethical issues it raises, the National Academy of Sciences brought together an international panel of scientists to discuss the technology and where it may be heading.

Panayiotis Zavos, like Antinori an advocate of human cloning, contended that Jaenisch was focusing only on failures.

‘‘But there are also successes. If we can clone an animal, we can clone an animal,’’ said Zavos, who runs a fertility clinic in Kentucky.

Antinori drew a fresh rebuke from Italian medical authorities on Monday, who warned that he risked losing his right to practice in Italy because of his plans to clone humans.

Antinori, who has repeatedly discussed plans to begin human cloning this year, told La Stampa newspaper that 1,300 couples in America, mostly in Kentucky, and 200 in Italy are candidates for his research and that he plans to start cloning embryos in November.

‘‘Ours will be an experiment of therapeutic cloning for those couples who have no hope of having children,’’ La Stampa quoted Antinori as saying. Because cloning would be illegal in Italy, he has said he would do the work in an unnamed Mediterranean country.

Zavos, who heads an organisation called The Andrology Institute, also has said he wants to begin cloning a human by the end of this year.

The Food and Drug Administration has prohibited human cloning in the United States, however.

Boisselier, in June, accepted an agreement with the FDA promising not to do human cloning experiments without agency approval. The agreement was signed after the FDA inspected her lab. The agency declined to say where it was located.

On Sunday, Mark Hunt, a West Virginia lawyer, said he had spent less than £350,000 to set up a lab for Boisselier in West Virginia, but now has changed his mind about asking her to clone his late son.

Boisselier is scientific director of Clonaid, which advertises cloning services on its Web site for fees starting at £140,000. It was founded in 1997 by a French racing car driver who changed his name to Rael and started the Raelian Movement, which claims that life on Earth was created by extraterrestrial scientists.

Among the debates over cloning is the issue of creating embryos to harvest stem cells for use in medical research.