So don't expect them to roll over easily or soon. But amid the chaos and doubt in Rome yesterday, it was clear, at least, that Severino Antinori and his partners had fired the starting gun in a race to produce a cloned human being. Boasting of unlimited funds, a choice of six countries to work in and an embarrassment of scientific expertise, the Antinori private human cloning consortium set out its stall at a seminar in Rome's Institute of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Or to put it another way, the consortium would not say where, when or how they would clone a human being, who would do it or how much it would cost. Cloning may be the last frontier in our attempts to defeat male sterility,' he said.
Cloning creates ordinary children who grow up to be unique individuals.
We do intend to clone the first human being,' said Panos Zavos, Mr Antinori's key partner, who runs a fertility clinic in Lexington, Kentucky. This is a solution to a human problem. Later he said the first experiments to lay the groundwork for the cloning programme could begin within weeks, with the first cloned embryo ready for implantation in a mother's womb within one and a half to two years. He ruled out using the technology to try to clone dead children or famous people. The idea was to help men who had no sperm to have genetically related children without relying on a sperm donor.