- PARIS (Sapa-DPA) - The first
human created by cloning is scheduled to be born in December, said controversial
Italian doctor Severino Antinori in an interview with the French newspaper
Liberation on Friday.
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- Antinori said 50 couples unable to conceive because of
masculine infertility had volunteered for his cloning programme.
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- "I transferred 18 embryos created by cloning, and
I obtained one pregnancy," he said. "The foetus has a good morphology."
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- With the embryo created by using tissue from the father,
the child will presumably be his exact genetic duplicate, and his twin,
if male.
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- Helping a 62-year-old woman become the oldest mother
everAt the time the interview was carried out, at the beginning of July,
the foetus was in its fifteenth week, making a December birth likely if
the pregnancy is carried to term.
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- Antinori refused to divulge the identity of the parents,
saying only that the baby would not be born in Italy.
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- A professor at the university of Torvergata, Antinori
made headlines in the past by helping a 62-year-old woman become the oldest
mother ever.
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- In addition, at a medical conference held last year in
Rome, he declared that he would clone a human being within a year.
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- Researchers have since warned that humans born of cloning
would suffer from a number of physical abnormalities, including fatty livers,
under-developed lungs and a defective immune system.
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- In the Liberation interview, Antinori defended his work
with cloning by saying that "the technique could enable men without
any spermatozoids, with no sex cells, to have a child".
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- He claimed that 120 million men around the world currently
suffered from this form of sterility.
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- http://www.itechnology.co.za/index.php?click_id=79&art_id=qw1026467640892B216&se
t_id=1
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