Mavericks claim creation of many cloned human embryos

Andy Coghlan

Mavericks aiming to produce the first cloned person have claimed they are already a step or two ahead of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts-based company that announced on Sunday it had created cloned human embryos.

"We've created many human embryos," says Brigitte Doisselier, chief executive officer at Clonaid, a California-based UFO cult that has vowed to produce cloned people. She welcomes news of ACT's cloned embryos: "I'm not feeling alone any more."

Doisselier refused to say whether any women were pregnant with cloned embryos, but told New Scientist: "The research on human cloning is done". She repeated a statement of April 2001 that "the next announcement will be the birth of a baby".

Cell count

Doisselier says that Clonaid has already published pictures on its website of cloned human embryos consisting of eight cells, two more than the most developed embryo created by ACT. She adds that once a patent has been filed, she aims to submit a report of Clonaid's cloning experiments for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Other would-be cloners are also keen to move forward. Severino Antinori, the controversial Italian fertility expert vowed to attempt human cloning earlier in 2001, together with Panayiotis Zavos of the Andrology Institute of America in Lexington, Kentucky.

Zavos failed to respond to New Scientist inquiries, but he is reported in The Sun, a UK tabloid newspaper, as wanting to clone a baby in Britain by Christmas. But even if Zavos's claim is true, he would be thwarted by a new British law that could be in place by the 30 November. This would ban anyone from implanting a cloned embryo into a woman's uterus.

Tough task

The unconfirmed claims of these scientists come as mainstream scientists cast doubt on ACT's experiments - implying that human cloning may be more difficult to achieve than thought. Only three of ACT's 19 cloned embryos grew beyond a single cell, and none grew larger than a ball of six cells.

Other scientists point out that embryos are only useful for medical purposes once they have become a "blastocyst" of 100 to 150 cells. At this point, they contain embryonic stem cells, the versatile cells which can in theory be extracted and converted into tissues or organs for transplant.

ACT's embryos fell well short of this. "It's a measure of how hard this is," says Tom Okarma, chief executive officer of Geron, a rival "stem cell" company in Menlo Park, California.

Harry Griffin, at the Roslin Institute, Scotland, where Dolly the Sheep was created, told Reuters that ACT's experiments were "more a political and ethical milestone than a scientific milestone, and certainly not a scientific breakthrough".

His colleague, Ian Wilmut, pointed out that eggs could reach the six-cell stage almost on "auto-pilot". "The fact that it did not develop beyond six cells suggests it is fairly lightweight research,'' Wilmut said.

World Association of Chemical Engineering