Three Babies Born From Cloning?
I don't believe a word of it. The notorious Italian fertility doctor claims that nine years ago he was able to bring three cloned babies to birth. From the story:
A controversial Italian doctor known for his work allowing post-menopausal women to have children has claimed in an interview to have cloned three babies who are now living in eastern Europe. "I helped give birth to three children with the human cloning technique," Severino Antinori, a prominent gynaecologist, told Oggi weekly in an interview to appear Wednesday. "It involved two boys and a girl who are nine years old today. They were born healthy and they are in excellent health now." He did not provide proof of his claims, but said cells from the three fathers, who were sterile, allowed the cloning to be carried out. The women's egg cells were impregnated in a laboratory through a method called "nuclear transfer," he said.So let me get this straight: Scientists all over the world have not been able to create cloned embryos and maintain them past the first few days of development. But nine years ago Antinori not only cloned successfully, but also implanted the resulting embryos for gestation and to birth, and moreover, unlike many animals, they have no health problems--and publicity hound that he is he kept quiet about it all these years?
Remember the Raelian's making fools of the media years ago when the group claimed the same thing? It was nonsense then, and this is nonsense now.
Labels: Human Cloning. Reproductive Cloning. Severinio Antinori.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 1:00 PM
11 Comments
11 Comments:
in 1979 I'm in Italy, decide to send home some things I've bought and don't want to have to keep carrying around with me, go to the post office and the sign says back in a few minutes which of course takes forever, they come back, tell me that the three carefully packed parcels, none of which have any wasted space in them, have to go as one, I say no I'll pay the extra postage I want them as three, I get home, and in a while one parcel, the size of one of the three, arrives with everything that was in all three in it, nothing broken, either, and I'll never know how they did it. Not to mention the thing a store in Florence said it would hold until they found the piece I wanted to match it, and that I'd receive it in such and such month, and I went home, and nothing arrived in the stated month, but the next year, it did, on my birthday no less. Not to mention the doctor from Italy who was able to treat my severe food allergies successfully using methods used in Europe that no other doctor in New York ever had heard of. I believe this guy. He could have been worried about trouble if it were known about nine years ago. He could be a showman, and SHS may be right, but I believe him.
p.s. (And just to be clear, it arrived in the same month they'd said -- only the following year.) Sometimes things, including announcements, take a little longer. That doesn't mean they didn't happen.
Definite nonesense; a more skeptical media would help. Egotists need their 15 min of fame. I guess Antinori is exploiting a comparatively underexplored niche for fame - cloning humans. Ahhh, I miss the good old days when you could obtain your fame from a failed bank heist or mail fraud. Hmmm, perhaps I should revive the cold fusion claims for my 15 min of fame...
Ianthe -
Eh. I'd be less skeptical if we had some kind of evidence, or at least a step-by-step procedure that could be replicated in another lab. So far from what I've heard, he's claiming the same procedures that have so far failed to produce human clones.
It kind of reminds me of the claim that someone made a long time back (I was in high school at the time, so at least fifteen years ago) that they'd successfully performed cold-water fusion. The same methods were tried over and over and never got anywhere. All well and good if someone wants to brag about doing something for the first time, but we need to see the results and have them be replicable for them to be of any use to us. Besides, that's the only way to prove the claim.
I always thought of cloning as something that was strictly science fiction, but when people started cloning pets, I got enraged. There's nothing that demeans our four-legged children like being cloned. You're replacing your one-of-a-kind animal with someone new, pretending you have your original baby back. That makes me angry. I'd despise anyone who tried to do the same thing with human babies. You can't replace a human being with another one who happens to share some genetic material.
Which is exactly what will end up happening if we allow cloning. That, or organ harvesting.
Ianthe -
P.S. - I believe you about getting your stuff from Italy the way you described. But it weirds me out that you were talking and buying things in 1979. I was two in 1979. I thought you were my age! You write like someone who's youthful. I mean that as a compliment. I'll go hide under my rock now...
T.E.: Well I'm not that old! How old do you have to be to be in Italy anyway? What you said about cloning, astrologically its impossible, because one does not come out of the same time as the other. That's one reason they have such a hard time with it...and shouldn't be trying to do it in the first place... I don't care (I mean I do, because it's animals, but you know what I mean) what they do in what lab; they have no credibility with me; they shouldn't be doing any of it; they should all close down; we've had enough out of them.
Cloning veggies to increase our food supply and help feed the poor, I could accept. Cloning animals of any type is nothing but trouble
ruddabega
Yes, and somehow even though the genetic material is a clone of the fathers' genes, one of the resulting offspring is somehow a girl. How many people does he think are that gullible?
Ginkgo 100 -
An excellent point. I suppose one would assume that a female could be produced by two X chromosomes from the father, except the X chromosomes would both be identical in nature and wouldn't be able to function as separate Xes, or so goes the boat my biology teacher once tried to float.
Well if we want the door open to all these wonderful advances in medicine for the benefit of humankind, it has to be open to him too.
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