Italian, U.S. Scientists Unveil Human Cloning Effort
Reuters Online Service
Samstag, 27. Januar 2001 00:58:00
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By Andrew Stern
CHICAGO (Reuters) - An international group of reproductive
experts plans to launch a serious effort to clone humans to
provide children to infertile couples, a U.S. scientist said on
Friday.
A viable embryo, probably using stem cells or other cells
taken from the man, could be available for implantation in the
woman's uterus within 18 months, said Dr. Panayiotis Zavos of The
Andrology Institute of America and the Kentucky Center for
Reproductive Medicine and Invitro Fertilization in Lexington,
Kentucky.
Zavos, a 25-year veteran in the reproductive field, hosted a
conference on Thursday in Lexington where he and Italian
fertility doctor Severino Antinori announced plans for the
scientific coalition to clone humans.
"This is going to be the first serious effort," Zavos said in
a telephone interview. "I do know various individual groups that
are acting on their own, but they lack the support."
Scientists have cloned sheep, beginning with "Dolly" in
Scotland in 1997, as well as mice and cows, but any suggestions
that human clones are next have been met by outrage within the
scientific community and in political and religious circles.
"As revolutionary as it may sound, as fictional as it may
sound, it will be done. It's a genie that is out of the bottle
and will be controlled," Zavos said.
He said 10 infertile couples have volunteered to participate,
including an American pair who cannot conceive because the man's
testicles were severed in an accident.
Zavos said his group would hold a conference in Rome in
March, to which a cardinal from the Vatican would be invited. The
Roman Catholic Church is opposed to human cloning. The consortium
would operate in an unnamed Mediterranean country.
The scientists plan to use regular cells or undifferentiated
stem cells from the husband and insert them into an ovacyte, a
woman's egg stripped of its genetic material. The cell would be
stimulated to divide and create an embryo equipped with all the
specialty cells that make up a copy of the man, and then
implanted in the wife's uterus.
The wives could also be the ones cloned, depending on the
couple's choice, he said.
"We have a great deal of knowledge. We can grade embryos, we
can do genetic screening, we can do quality control," Zavos said.
"It's not the easiest thing. The stability of the genetic
information is what's important. We're cloning a human being now,
we're not trying to create a Dolly. You don't want to create a
monster," he said.
To create animal clones, scientists frequently made hundreds
of failed attempts to develop viable embryos. Medical ethicists
have posed the possibility of cruel failures in human cloning,
where genetic abnormalities result in grotesque fetuses unable to
survive outside the womb.
Antinori has sparked a furor in Italy by helping
post-menopausal women become "granny moms," and has also
pioneered a technique to help sterile men by "cultivating" their
nascent sperm cells inside the testicles of mice.