SEVERINO ANTINORI is a rich Italian doctor with a string of private fertility
clinics to his name. He likes watching football and professes the Catholic
faith. Yet the Vatican is no fan of his science.
In his clinics, Antinori already offers every IVF treatment under the Sun,
but still there are couples he cannot help. So now the man Italians call Dr
Miracle is offering to clone his patients to create the babies they so
desperately want.
And of course it鈥檚 created quite a stir, with other scientists rounding on
Antinori as religious leaders line up to slam his cloning plan as an affront to
human dignity. Yet it鈥檚 an ambition Antinori has expressed many times before.
What鈥檚 new is that finally it seems to be building a head of steam. Like-minded
scientists from the US have joined Antinori in his cloning odyssey. At a
conference in Rome last week they claimed hundreds of couples have already
volunteered for the experiments.
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Suddenly, the idea of cloning people is no longer the preserve of cranks,
religious sects and those on the fringes. 杏吧原创s with credentials and track
records seem to be entering the field. Antinori shot to fame seven years ago
helping post-menopausal grandmothers give birth using donor eggs. Later he
pioneered the use of mice to incubate the sperm of men with poor fertility. He
is clearly no ordinary scientist but a showman who thrives on controversy and
pushing reproductive biology to the limits. And that of course is one reason why
he鈥檚 seen as being so dangerous.
The other, paradoxically, is that his idea of using cloning to combat
infertility is not as mad as it sounds. Many people have a hard job seeing the
point of reproductive cloning. Why bother when there are surrogate mums, egg
donors and sperm banks around, not to mention adoption agencies? But this view
is too simplistic. For some couples, cloning represents the only hope of having
a child carrying their genes, and scientists like Antinori are probably right to
say that much of our revulsion to cloning as a fertility treatment is
irrational. In future we may want to change our minds and allow it in special
circumstances.
But only when the science is ready. And that鈥檚 the real problem. Five years
on from Dolly, the science of cloning is still stuck in the dark ages. The basic
recipe might sound simple: take an empty egg, fuse it with a cell from the
animal you want to clone, then give it a jolt of electricity. But the failure
rate is a staggering 97 per cent and malformed fetuses all too common. Even when
cloning works, nobody understands why. So forget the complex moral arguments. To
begin cloning people now, before even the most basic questions have been
answered, is simply a reckless waste of time and energy.
Which is not to say that Antinori will fail, only that if he succeeds it is
likely to be at an unacceptably high price. Hundreds of eggs and embryos will be
wasted and lots of women will go through difficult pregnancies resulting in
miscarriages or abortions. A few years from now techniques will have improved
and the wastage won鈥檛 be as excessive. But right now there seems to be little
anyone can do to keep the cloners at bay.
And it鈥檚 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.
So what about tougher laws? 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鈥檒l 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. He believes it is only a matter
of time before we lose our hang-ups about reproductive cloning and accept it as
just another IVF technique. 鈥淥nce the first baby is born and it cries,鈥� he said
last week, 鈥渢he world will embrace it.鈥�
But the world will never embrace the first cloned baby if it is sickly or
deformed or the sole survivor of hundreds of pregnancies. In jumping the gun, Dr
Miracle and his colleagues are taking one hell of a risk. If their instincts are
wrong, the backlash against cloning鈥攁nd indeed science as a
whole鈥攃ould be catastrophic.
