IVF community doubts clone doctor claims

Australia's IVF community is deeply sceptical of claims by Italian embryologist Severino Antinori that the first birth of a cloned human embryo will take place in early January.

And an analysis of his claims reveal that serious problems beset Antinori's controversial cloning program.

The fertility specialist has announced a cloned male foetus weighing 2.7kg is now in its 33rd week and has given it a "more than 90 per cent chance" of being born, according to press reports.

Another two women are pregnant with cloned embryos who are 28 and 27 weeks old, he claimed.

But when compared against earlier statements by Antinori, his latest remarks suggest his cloning implantation experiments are struggling with a steep failure rate.

In early April, he was quoted by New Scientist as claiming one woman taking part in his human cloning program was eight weeks pregnant. Three weeks later, on April 24, he told Italian state TV that three cloned human pregnancies existed at that moment.

If true, one of those would now be at term and all would have been further advanced than the trio on which he is currently focusing attention. That implies a 100 per cent failure rate among his earlier implantations.

By comparison, the implantation success rate for non-cloned IVF embryos is about 20 per cent in Australia, with some centres achieving rates of more than 50 per cent.

A 100 per cent failure rate for Antinori's cloning efforts would not surprise Australian IVF specialists who condemn Antinori's efforts as unprincipled, irresponsible, unethical and immoral.

Even if the births do take place, most specialists would be unwilling to accept Antinori's assurances that the embryos were cloned.

"There is so little success in all animal models that it would surprise me and I would demand to see the evidence [of cloning] before I would accept his claims," said Dr Gayle Jones, secretary of the Fertility Society of Australia (FSA), the peak body for reproductive medicine.

"Even with IVF human embryos there is a high spontaneous abortion rate and I suspect, given the evidence with animal species, that the rate [for cloned embryos] will be very, very high."

Antinori has been quoted as saying the success rate with human clones is likely to be higher than that achieved with animal species.

Specialists in the field dismissed that out of hand.

"There is no scientific evidence for statements like that," Jones said. "The reproductive efficiency in humans is very much less than in the domestic animal industry."

The FSA supports a moratorium on reproductive cloning in Australia but Jones said her comments reflected her own views and were not made on behalf of the FSA.

Antinori first announced his plans to use cloning technology to help infertile couples have children three years ago.

Now 57, he first hit the headlines in 1994 when a 63-year-old post-menopausal woman became the oldest known woman to give birth after he implanted a donor's fertilised egg in her uterus.

He claims more than 1500 couples have volunteered as candidates for his research programme and has countered Italian government moves to outlaw the birth of a cloned embryo by proposing to carry out the procedure in another country or on a boat in international waters.

He has conceded it would be immoral to try to clone humans just for the sake of it but justifies his conduct as a humanitarian program to help infertile couples.