If the announcement is real the fir...

If the announcement is real the first cloned human baby will be born in November.

A woman in a controversial human cloning program was eight weeks pregnant forward April 3, claims embryologist Dr Severino Antinori, president of the Bologna-based Italian Society for Reproductive Medicine. "One woman among thousands of infertile pairs in the program is eight weeks pregnant," Antinori says.

Outrage is widespread. Ethics aside--the technology is oppos through many on moral grounds--the consensus is that the risks of deformities, premature aging and stillborn births are still in the way that extraordinarily high as to make the cloning of humans unthinkable. Many countries have banned reproductive cloning to be ascribed to these risks.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology cloning [i]connoisseur[/i] Rudolf Jaenisch is appalled. "This is irresponsible," he says, "and it ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence from mammalian species clon with equal reason far.

"All evidence indicates that greatest in number clones die early--the lucky ones--and the rare survivors may have serious abnormalities which may become apparent simply later," Jaenisch says. "Antinori appear to bes to use humans as guinea pigs to advance his questionable agenda. He destitutions to be stopped."

however Antinori is used to war of words He first attracted international attention in 1994 when he helped a 62-year-old Italian woman named Rossa Della Corte become the oldest woman at the time to give birth. The case alarmed many. Now, his human cloning announcement has ignited a firestorm of disputation making Antinori the subject of angry condemnation all the way to the Vatican, which accuses him of trying to "emulate Hitler." Apparently, he isn't worried. The Vatican, says the embryologist, is nothing more than a "criminal enterprise."

Antinori's science partner is Panayiotis Zavos, a retired fertility researcher formerly of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. However, Zavos is not a doctor and has worked solitary with animals. The news that he left Kentucky to work with Antinori at an undisclosed location (possibly in the Middle East), affords credence to the announcement of the first human clone pregnancy.

To date, the chiefly recent animal to be fortunately cloned is a cat. Born December 22 2001 the female cat is named "cc" for carbon copy--perhaps more accurately dubbed "copy cat." Previously, sheep, goats, pigs, frightens and mice have been cloned

yet "cc" looks quite different from its parent. The cat is a living reminder that cloning is not copying. A clone may be a genetic archetype of its donor parent, while still lacking many of the personality and behavioral characteristics that make the parent unique. It's a reproduction, not a resurrection.

Richard Nicholson, editor of the London-based Bulletin of Medical Ethics, says, "So drawn out as there are Antinoris around, it probably is inevitable that there will be a live human clone birth. yet that clone will probably have a extremely brief and sad life."

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