On April 3, 2002, Dr. Severino Antinori announced he had successfully implanted a cloned embryo into a woman and that she was eight weeks pregnant. Dr. Antinori made his announcement while speaking at a conference on Healthcare Ethics in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Sharing the stage with Dr. Antinori was Dr. Haris Silajdzic, a former Bosnian Prime Minister and Hisham Yousuf, a representative of the Cairo-based Arab League. Dr. Antinori refused to disclose either the location or the nationality of his pregnant patient. He admitted that there was 'risk involved' but said he had pursued screening to reduce the risk of any deformity before the embryo was implanted and that the outcomes of cloning differed widely between species. Dr. Antinori also insisted that he was interested in therapeutic cloning and had to pursue his work in that area in other countries as it is outlawed in Italy.
In 1998, Dr Antinori announced plans to use cloning technology to help infertile couples have children. British scientists to produce Dolly the sheep, the world's first vertebrate clone made from an adult mammalian cell, had pioneered the technology. In 2001, he predicted that he would complete the first human cloning operation within 18 months. The 56-year-old was previously best known for his work in in vitro fertilisation, and in particular for enabling women in their 50s and 60s to give birth. He shot to prominence in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old woman to have a baby by implanting a donor's fertilised egg in her uterus, making her the oldest known women in the world to give birth. Dr Antinori told an Italian newspaper recently that more than 1,500 couples had volunteered as candidates for his research programme, and it is known that he is working in close co-operation with Dr Panos Zavos, an American fertility expert.
Dr Antinori faces the outrage of those who oppose the procedure on ethical and moral grounds. The practice of human cloning is banned in Europe and formal legislation is now going through Congress in the United States. It is because of this reason that it is of more than passing interest that the 'world breaking' announcement was made at the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, as I feel this underscores a subtle continuing shift of the centre of cloning research from the western World to Middle Eastern and Asian localities. The United States has recently placed a five-year moratorium and ban on human cloning describing it as 'a violation of human rights'. It has also allowed countries such as India and Singapore to pursue stem cell technology on its behalf. It is widely rumoured that China has already cloned many human embryos to use in therapeutic cloning and stem cell research. It now appears that the United Arab Emirates is interested in promoting the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi in a new role of encouraging evolving scientific research within the Arab World. It is also acknowledged that officials such as the UAE Minister of Health Under-secretary Dr. Abdul Rahim Jaafar has more than a passing interest in making his nation the centre of cloning research. He already has stated that he intends to group other Arab League countries, the East Mediterranean Region Office of the World Health Organization, the Islamic Organization for Medical Services and the International Association of Bioethics together for the 2004 Congress of Bioethics, with the UAE as a possible venue for the event. He stated recently that we should explore how to preserve our fundamental human values and 'adhere to our respective religious teaching in channelling new scientific knowledge to benefit our fellow man'.
Dr. Antinori spoke to the conference and reiterated his view that everyone had the right to pass on his or her individual characteristics to their offspring or to use cloning as a means to treat infertility. As doctors, we should also be aware that while Asian Muslims, Buddhists, and some Asian governments also oppose reproductive cloning, they apparently are not constrained by the ethical embryo debate, which has halted most cloning research in the Western World with the exception of Great Britain. Of more importance is the fact that the UAE, now appears to be challenging the Western World by staging the conference on 'The Future of Genetic Engineering and Cloning' in the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi. Many scientists attending the conference noted accusations that Western (it would probably not be unfair to read Christian) thought and ethics is fundamentalist, rigid and ultimately destructive to science, medicine and the pursuit of knowledge. This is almost the antithesis of the fundamentalist Islamic belief recently seen in Iran that said that Western petrochemical research was ultimately antireligious. There is little doubt that the great cultural interface that exists between Christianity and the Islamic faith, which presently holds centre stage in our news, echoes through the debate about human cloning and human cloning technology.
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