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U.S. scientists doubt Italian doctor's claim woman in clone program is pregnant

April 6 2002-(AP) - A newspaper report quoting an Italian doctor who said a woman in his human cloning program is pregnant was met with criticism and skepticism Friday from scientists and ethicists. The English-language Gulf News of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said fertility specialist Dr. Severino Antinori made his comments while visiting Dubai for a conference on cloning and genetic engineering. In response to a question about his project to clone humans, he was quoted as saying: "Our project is at a very advanced stage. One woman among the thousands of infertile couples in the program is eight weeks pregnant." He did not specifically say that the woman was carrying a cloned fetus nor explain the technique used in the pregnancy. The newspaper said he refused to say what country the woman comes from. Antinori heads a private fertility clinic in Rome. In 1994, he succeeded in helping a 62-year-old woman give birth to a boy. Spokeswomen for Antinori said he would not comment on the newspaper report, and he did not answer calls to his cell phone. The office of his partner in the cloning project, Dr. Panayiotis Zavos at the Andrology Institute of America in Lexington, Ky., also declined to comment. The report did provoke a response from Dr. William Keye, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which opposes using cloning to make human babies. "Despite the assertions of progress made by some self-proclaimed cloning experts, there is no scientific evidence to justify an attempt to clone a human being," he said in a statement from the organization. "We urge the media, the public and policy makers to meet such claims with skepticism rather than alarm, unless they are accompanied by peer-reviewed scientific evidence."Ronald M. Green, who directs the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., also said it's far from certain that an eight-week-old pregnancy would lead to a birth. "The record in animal cloning has been so disastrous in terms of fetal survival that I would hesitate to think that this pregnancy will necessarily go to term," he said. Dr. George Daley, a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., said he could not comment on scientific aspects of the report. "I can only repeat my strong belief that based on what we know about the risks and limitations of animal cloning, the pursuit of reproductive cloning by these individuals is irresponsible and dangerous," he said

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