More calls to police cloning

It is either a profound development in biotechnology or - as many suspect - the new century's biggest scientific hoax yet.

Clonaid, a Bahamas-based company owned by a religious sect called the Raelians, is claiming that two babies produced by cloning have been born - the latest just this Friday. The company says it expects three more cloned babies to be delivered this month.

Regardless of the truth of Clonaid's claims, however, the announcements are expected to trigger renewed efforts from the United Nations to the United States Congress to ban cloning.

Where supporters see the practice as new way to have children, the concept of human cloning jars with many people's religious beliefs. Even the few scientists who are not morally opposed to reproductive cloning favor going slowly until questions of safety are addressed.

Since 1998, at least 33 countries, including 19 European nations, have banned cloning.

At the UN, talks are continuing over drafts of an international convention that would ban reproductive cloning of human beings. Later this year, Canada is expected to pass a cloning ban.

And in the US, lawmakers in the House and Senate are expected to reintroduce measures first proposed last year. Apart from the moral revulsion many feel about cloning human beings, cloning experiments on animals show that the procedure is fraught with risk for the mother as well as the offspring.

"This will catalyze the congressional debate," says Michael Werner, vice president for bioethics at the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington, of the Clonaid announcements.

The company's claims have met with moral indignation from many religious leaders, scientists, and bioethicists. Biologists outside the company - including Clonaid competitor Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor - have expressed deep skepticism about the veracity of the claims. Dr. Antinori last year indicated that his efforts to clone humans to help infertile couples were expected to result in several births this month.

Efforts to verify Clonaid's claims have foundered since the company's Dec. 27 press conference to announce that the world's first clone had been born to an American. By the middle of last week, the firm had backtracked on testing. It cited the parents' desire to retain their privacy after a Florida lawyer petitioned the state's supreme court to appoint a legal guardian for the baby girl. The identities and locations of the second child, born to a Dutch mother, are also a secret.

Yet researchers say tests to verify the genetic similarities between the baby and the source of its genetic material could easily be conducted in ways that safeguard privacy.

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