Doctor says first human clone is only a month away

The Italian fertility expert Severino Antinori, who has infuriated much of the medical world with his claims to be on the brink of cloning a child, now says a woman carrying a cloned embryo is only a month away from giving birth.

Dr Antinori shot to international fame in 1994 when he pioneered in-vitro fertilisation for post-menopausal woman and enabled an Italian woman of 62 to bear a child. Many scientists and doctors criticised Dr Antinori for attempting unethical research on human subjects and for failing to subject his claims to peer-review.

The Vatican denounced Dr Antinori's work yesterday as "grotesque" and "evil", but peers, including Professor Robert Edwards, who was jointly responsible with the late Sir Patrick Steptoe for producing the first test-tube baby, have praised his pioneering work on helping men with low sperm counts to conceive.

Dr Antinori's claim that the first cloned human is about to be born hassparked further controversy. In April, he saidthree women were pregnant with cloned embryos, two in Russia and one in "an Islamic state". He gave no more details. This week he said "several" women were pregnant with such embryos; one was at 33 weeks and the foetus was "absolutely healthy", weighing 2.7kg. But he refused to be drawn on where the child would be born except to say "in countries where it is permitted."

The idea of cloning a baby is to allow couples where the man produces no sperm to conceive without having recourse to sperm banks. The technique involves transferring genetic material in the nucleus of living cells into eggs that have had their own nucleus removed. The eggs can be induced to divide into an embryo that can be implanted into a woman's uterus. The resulting child would in theory be genetically identical to the "father".

Specialists in cloning, however, point to the immense difficulties of such work, which has never been successfully achieved in primates despite many attempts.

The first vertebrate mammal to be cloned from adult cells was Dolly the sheep, after 277 attempts by Professor Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Subsequent attempts to clone cattle, sheep, pigs, mice and goats have had high failure rates, the cloned animals suffering from problems such as congenital defects, oversized foetuses and stillbirths. Ethicists say it would be immoral to do similar work on humans when the animal studies suggest it is so dangerous.

Dr Antinori has claimed that genetic screening of the embryo ensures safe development, but other experts say that adequate screening is not yet possible. Professor Art Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania said: "If you look at the animal work that's been done, the procedure is just not safe."

And Harry Griffin of the Roslin Institute warned last year: "The efficiency of cloning is low. It would be wholly unethical to test out ideas for improving the success rate on women before they have been proven in animals."

But Dr Antinori is not inhibited by such warnings. While he will not be involved in the baby's delivery, he has given a "cultural and scientific contribution" to a consortium of scientists working on the project.

After Dr Antinori's latest bombshell, medical experts said he had not provided enough information for them to draw meaningful conclusions.

Anne McLaren of the Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK Institute at Cambridge University said of his claim: "It is possible but I am highly sceptical. It is unlikely to be true ... We will just wait and see what the DNA studies show if a baby is born. I just hope it will not have abnormalities." Sandy Thomas, the director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, said: "I would not rule out the possibility that he has managed to do this but I would fear for what the consequences might be in terms of deformities."