But right now there seems to be little anyone can do to keep the cloners at bay. And it's not just Antinori and his team who are raring to go. A religious sect called the Raelians believes cloning is the key to achieving immortality, and it, too, claims to have the necessary egg donors and volunteers willing to be implanted with cloned embryos. Implanting cloned human embryos is already illegal in many countries but it will never be outlawed everywhere. In any case, criminalising cloning is more likely to drive it underground than stamp it out.
Secrecy is already a problem.
Antinori and his team are refusing to name the Mediterranean country they'll be using as their base. And who knows where the Raelians will be manipulating their eggs and embryos. Like it not, the research is going ahead. Sooner or later we are going to have to decide whether regulation is safer than prohibition. Antinori would go for regulation, of course.