Plans to clone a human later this year are greeted with horror

Church and anti-abortion groups have reacted with horror to plans by an international medical team to try to clone a human being later this year. The researchers believe they will succeed in delivering a cloned baby within two years.

An Italian, Prof Severino Antinori, who gained international notoriety by helping a 62year-old woman become the world's oldest mother, is leading the project. Prof Antinori claims to have more than 600 patients ready to try the cloning procedure and has an unnamed Mediterranean country ready to support his work.

The researchers revealed their radical plans at a news conference yesterday in Rome. The "parents" will be able to choose whose cells will be used to create the clone, which will then be implanted in the mother's womb.

The work would be outlawed in France, Spain and the Republic of Ireland. Britain last year changed regulations that would allow cloning experiments using human cells but prevent creation of a full-term baby.

The team plans to employ the same techniques used to create Dolly the cloned sheep, but Dolly's creator, Dr Ian Wilmut, warned about the high failure rate. It took 277 attempts before Dolly was delivered, he said. Many ended in malformed animals.

The method takes a healthy egg cell from the mother, removes its nucleus and then replaces its genetic material with a nucleus from a cell recovered from the father or mother. The child would be a physical duplicate of its donor but would likely be a wholly different personality.

Prof Antinori has justified the research by claiming it will help childless, infertile couples. "Some people say we are going to clone the world, but this isn't true. We're talking science, we're not here to create a fuss."

Commentators did not generally accept this view yesterday. "This is a momentous step to take, and society should tremble before doing something so radical," said Prof Jack Scarisbrick, chairman of the UK antiabortion charity Life. It would involve creating an entirely new kind of human being, he said.

Cloning would raise profoundly disturbing ethical issues, according to Bishop Elio Sgreccia, head of the John Paul II Institute for Bioethics at Rome's Gemelli Hospital. "Those who made the atomic bomb went ahead in spite of knowing about its terrible destruction. But this doesn't mean that it was the best choice for humanity," he said.