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09 August 2001
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THE WORLD
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Clone doctor compared to Hitler
By The Times
August 09, 2001
AN Italian doctor who wants to clone humans has been accused of "trying to emulate Hitler".
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope's doctrine watchdog, said that the plans announced by embryologist Severino Antinori at a conference in the US yesterday were "Nazi madness" aimed at creating a super race.
But Dr Antinori – addressing a panel of experts who are reviewing the issue at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington – argued that his research was vital.
"Cloning will help us put an end to so many diseases, give infertile men the chance to have children. We can't miss this opportunity," he said.
But scientists and religious groups at the meeting condemned his proposals.
The head of Italy's medical council, Giuseppe Del Barone, said that creating cloned babies was "a rape of nature which goes against human dignity". Others warned that the plan risked producing children with abnormalities as many uncertainties remained over the health of cloned animals.
Dr Antinori said up to 3000 couples had volunteered for treatment. All are unable to conceive because of the infertility of the male partner.
His plan is to use cells from the husband to create embryos which could then be brought to term by the wife. The result would be an identical genetic copy of the husband.
Alan Colman, research director of PPL Therapeutics, the commercial arm of the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh where Dolly the sheep was cloned, called the hearing "a circus" and warned that if Dr Antinori proceeded with his plan, "he would end up with lots of abortions".
He told the panel that cloning in animals was improving as techniques advanced.
"The bottom line is practice makes perfect. But is it ethical to practice in humans? I think it isn't," Dr Colman said.
Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist and animal cloning pioneer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute, told the panel that only 1 to 5 per cent of cloned animals survived.
"Even clones that survive to birth often have severe abnormalities and die prematurely later," he said.
Panos Zavos, a Kentucky fertility specialist working with Dr Antinori, acknowledged that human cloning involved risks. But he said his team would inform potential patients about the chances of birth defects before any cloning procedure was undertaken.
"There is no such thing as total perfection in the business of human reproduction," he told the panel.
Dr Antinori said his team hoped to make its first cloning attempt by the end of the year.
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