Making Babies

Until yesterday, this man was best known for helping a 62-year-old woman to bear a child. Now, Severino Antinori says that he intends to begin the cloning of human beings. His claims have caused outrage around the world. But should he be stopped, or is the advent of human cloning really just a matter of time?

It was the cloning story of the century. An ageing and impotent billionaire called Max with no children and no prospect of an heir to his vast fortune hires a brilliant but unquestioning scientist. They recruit a gullible young woman who is prepared to become pregnant with Max's cloned embryo. Somewhere on an island in the Pacific Ocean, the deed is done. It was a story any newspaper editor would have died for, and the New York Post was no exception when, on the morning of 3 March 1978, it ran a banner headline across its front page: BABY BORN WITHOUT MOTHER: HE'S THE FIRST HUMAN CLONE.

The story was not meant to be a joke, even though it was eventually discredited. It had been based on a leak from a forthcoming book by David Rorvik, a respected but little-known science writer who had claimed to have played a key role in introducing the mysterious Max to the unnamed scientist. Rorvik insisted that his book, In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, was the true story of how a baby had been cloned.

But that was 23 years ago, when test-tube babies were still a figment of Aldous Huxley's imagination and no one had envisaged the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first clone of an adult mammal. Now, if Severino Antinori has his way, the first cloned baby could soon be born. Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor with a clinic in Rome, says he wants to help childless couples to clone themselves and, as he told the US National Academy of Sciences yesterday, he has recruited hundreds of willing participants in the controversial experiment.

Some dismiss Antinori as a maverick self-publicist. Some say the technology of cloning is too unreliable, and that the problems of creating genetically identical humans mean it will always be too unsafe. For such sceptics, it is worth considering what happened in the immediate aftermath of Rorvik's spectacular claim.

For weeks the story led the news. Ethicists and theologians discussed the finer points of cloning. Politicians declared their outrage and scientists lined up either to denounce their anonymous colleague or ridicule the whole idea of human cloning as scientifically impossible. "Cloning in man or any other animal is not just a technical problem to be solved soon but may, in fact, never occur," said one scientist. "Our actual experience so far does not suggest that cloning with adults is possible," said another.

How wrong they were.

It was one of the unwritten dogmas of biology that cloning from the cell of a fully mature adult mammal was not feasible. Experiments in the 1960s had shown it was possible to clone adult frogs from tadpole cells, and to clone tadpoles from adult cells, but no one was able to grow the cloned tadpoles to adulthood. Even in amphibians, there seemed an insurmountable barrier stopping the cloning of a fully mature adult from the cell of an adult. Early experiments on mammals – in this case mice – confirmed the view. Eventually scientists lost interest in trying to do something many of them felt was impossible.

For 20 years cloning was relegated to science-fiction books and films exploiting our fascination with the idea of identical people being formed into an army of clones. The theme surfaced in films such as The Boys from Brazil – the story of Hitler clones being created in South America – and the futuristic Blade Runner.

Then came Dolly, whose birth was announced in February 1997. Scientists injected the nucleus of a cell taken from a six-year-old ewe into an unfertilised egg which had had its own nucleus removed. They "starved" the combined cell as it bathed in its culture medium, a key step that led to the "reprogramming" of the cell's adult genes to revert to a more embryonic condition.

Dolly suddenly caused the rules of biology to be rewritten. She was living proof that an adult skin cell – in her case taken from the udder – was capable of developing into a fully mature, apparently healthy adult. If it could be done for sheep, why not humans? What was there to stop scientists taking a man's skin cell, extracting his genetic material and injecting it into the unfertilised egg of a woman – just like Rorvik's story of Max?

No sooner had Dolly's existence been announced to a stunned world than theologians, ethicists and professional opinionists lined up to condemn the idea that humans could be next. President Bill Clinton denounced the prospect of human cloning as "morally repugnant".

In terms of the fears raised by films such as The Boys from Brazil, cloning would most certainly be repugnant if it could be used to create armies of automatons loyal to evil dictators. But no serious scientist believes this is the issue. Their ethical concerns centre on the potential dangers to the developing embryo and the wastage that cloning would cause in human eggs. Dolly was the result of 277 attempts to inject the nucleii of adult sheep cells into unfertilised and enucleated eggs. No human trial could take place with that rate of success. More important, all cloning research has resulted in an extraordinarily high rate of clones that are either stillborn or born with birth defects.

Research published last month found that many clones carry an unusually high "burden" of genetic abnormalities; though the animals appear healthy and develop normally, they may suffer serious problems that could shorten their lives. "It surely adds yet more evidence that there should be a moratorium against copying people. How can anybody take the risk of cloning a baby when the outcome is unpredictable?" asks Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly.

Yet any technical problems can no doubt be overcome if the will is there. The scientists who were the first to clone adult mice, the year after Dolly's appearance, did so by a technique that turns out to be more efficient than that used to create Dolly. Other teams have shown that cloning can work on pigs, cattle and goats. But equally, no one has been successful with rabbits, rats, dogs, cats and, more significantly, monkeys.

Even if scientists show they can clone a chimpanzee, man's closest relative, we won't really be sure whether we can clone humans or not until we try. And trying will mean taking risks, which for some people will always be too high to be ethically acceptable. Alan Colman, who worked alongside Wilmut, believes the technical difficulties will only be resolved by experiments on human eggs, which will not be acceptable. "These issues will not be addressable since the use of human eggs to check for safety and technical progress is, and will remain, an unethical application," he says.

Nevertheless, as any historian of science can testify, no matter how great the technical problems, they have a habit of being resolved. If so, the ethical issue is not whether the likes of Severino Antinori should be banned from going ahead with cloning on the grounds that it is unsafe, but whether they should be prohibited because it is, in Clinton's words, morally repugnant.

There should be nothing repugnant in the existence of two or three genetically identical people, otherwise we'd find some way of banning twins and triplets. So what are we afraid of? Clones will be identical in genes, yes, but in personality, temperament and outlook, they will be as unique as any natural twin.

So what are we left with as the morally repugnant objection to cloning? Is it that it involves bypassing sexual reproduction? What should be so abhorrent in that, given that many children are now conceived artificially by in vitro fertilisation. Many of the critics of IVF said, after Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in 1978, that such babies are likely to suffer physical or psychological problems. The evidence of long-term studies of thousands of IVF children shows that such fears are without foundation.

Antinori believes that whatever the risks of human cloning, they are manageable. His attitude to reproductive medicine has not endeared him to colleagues, but it would be wrong to dismiss him out of hand. Unlike Richard Seed, the American who was the first scientist to go public on supporting human cloning when the news of Dolly broke, Antinori is not totally out of his depth. However, although he has a proven track record in IVF, his expertise does not extend to cloning. He may have a point when he says there are instances where cloning might be justified on medical grounds; for example, men who cannot produce any sperm. But critics are right to say he is not the man to pioneer a technology in its infancy.

Antinori may find it difficult to carry out his experiment in most countries, but presumably there will be parts of the world where anti-cloning laws do not exist yet. It is clear, however, that banning Antinori's work will not put the cloning genie back in the bottle. Many scientists believe the ethical boundaries will be stretched to allow it. Some think it is inevitable. As one cloning pioneer has said: "It just won't be called cloning."