World gangs up on human cloning

International efforts are now growing to try to outlaw one of the most controversial possibilities of recent reproductive research: cloning humans. Spurring these moves last month were the outspoken plans of Italian fertility specialist, Severino Antinori and his colleague Panayiotis Zavos, who announced at a meeting in Washington that they were pushing ahead with experiments on human cloning and predicted that they would help create the world’s first cloned baby next year. The announcement has begun the countdown to a much heralded but largely unwelcome development that will be undertaken without government supervision and despite warnings of potentially serious consequences for its human participants. Antinori and Zavos said 2,000 women with fertility problems had volunteered for the experiment. They will choose a shortlist of 200 but say they will only consider patients for whom no other fertility treatment is possible. But the imminence of such work has led to calls for the UN now to intervene to help block any such developments. The researchers’ plan was revealed at a National Academy of Sciences conference on cloning, and was denounced as dangerous and immoral by other researchers. They warned that it would lead to miscarriages and the development of deformed babies. “I think it is dreadful,” said Alan Colman, the research director of PPL Therapeutics, the Edinburgh-based company which helped in the cloning of Dolly the sheep five years ago. The conference’s aims were to assess the state of cloning technology for a public discussion document to be published within three months’ time. The United Nations general assembly is now expected to start an urgent debate on a world-wide ban on human cloning for reproductive purposes, at the joint request of France and Germany. The two countries have circulated a draft resolution proposing a committee to draft a legally binding convention banning the practice. They have also written to Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary general, asking him to put News focus