Father of the Impossible Children
Ignoring nearly universal opprobrium, Severino Antinori presses ahead with plans to clone a human being
A few hundred yards away from the Vatican, a fertility clinic has become both the top destination for desperate couples and the pope's most troublesome neighbor. As clients enter, they are greeted in the narrow corridor by a huge portrait of a pregnant Madonna. The towering image is an auspicious sign for the half a dozen couples who eagerly wait their turn for a consultation. As they sit, a man in a green surgical suit rushes from room to room, often yelling in a raspy voice on his mobile phone. His harried assistant witnesses the scene with dismay. "I'm going to die. I swear I'm going to die," she mutters.
The taskmaster in the scrubs is Severino Antinori, a physician whose reputation among infertile couples is far overshadowed by his international fame as the man who wants to clone a human being. Antinori's unapologetic stance has provoked worldwide condemnation that reached its crescendo last summer, when an eminent representative of the Catholic Church compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Cloning is Antinori's latest push on the ethics of assisted reproductive technology. In 1989 he made headlines for helping a 47-year-old woman become the first to give birth after menopause--a feat achieved via a donated egg and hormones. Five years later he enabled Rosanna Della Corte to set a world record as the oldest woman to give birth, at age 63. The Vatican labeled the experiment "grotesque" and "against the laws of Nature," but some researchers praised it as an admirable scientific achievement.
Antinori was born 56 years ago to small landowners in a village of Abruzzi, a region of central-southern Italy. The young Severino would watch with fascination while his uncle, a veterinarian, would artificially inseminate cows on surrounding farms. After his family moved to Rome, Antinori signed up for medical studies, where he soon discovered his intolerance for, as he puts it, the "academic mafia that was ruling the university." Still, he met Caterina Versaci there, and the two married shortly after they received their medical degrees. Specializing in gastroenterology and, later, in gynecology, Antinori worked in various posts around Italy before landing at Regina Elena, a public fertility hospital in Rome. In 1986, he says, he oversaw the birth of the first Italian child to be conceived in a publicly funded clinic through in vitro fertilization (IVF). But after clashing with some of his colleagues and hospital administrators, he resigned and, with his wife, set up the Associated Researchers for Human Reproduction (RAPRUI) clinic.
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Some 6,600 infertile couples have signed up to be cloned, according to Antinori.
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Antinori made his mark in the late 1980s, when he pioneered a technique called subzonal insemination (SUZI) to position sperm below the zona pellucida, the barrier around the egg, or oocyte. His work opened the way to intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which a single sperm is injected directly into the egg cell. He later introduced lasers to facilitate embryonic implantation. His résumé lists a professorship of human reproduction at the University of Rome as well as about 40 journal publications. In the past decade, however, he has become more involved with the judicial system than the peer-review one: he claims to have filed at least 36 libel suits, many still pending, against journalists, colleagues and his "Taliban" foes--his term for the Catholic Church.
"You know what the cardinals said when I invented SUZI?" Antinori asks. "That I was violating the barrier that God had put up to protect life. ICSI is routine today. It is the only option for millions of men who are subfertile"--that is, men who have low-motility sperm. Indeed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 90 percent of U.S. fertility labs offered the procedure in 1999, although geneticists warn that the technique results in an alarming number of chromosomal abnormalities.
But ICSI is not enough to help all his patients. There are 100 million men who don't produce any sperm, and genetic reprogramming is the sole solution, he says. "Genetic reprogramming!" he emphasizes. "Not cloning. Cloning is a Hollywood-style term. It makes you think that you'll get a series of identical individuals. That's idiocy." Even if most of the clone's DNA comes from the donated nucleus, he argues, the oocyte still contributes a small percentage of genes from the mitochondria, meaning that cloning to produce two identical individuals is impossible.
The world glimpsed Antinori's flamboyance last August, when he, along with other would-be cloners, including Panayiotis Zavos and Brigitte Boisselier, took on the medical establishment at a colloquium organized by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C. Most animal clones die before delivery or suffer from severe birth defects. Top experts, including the creator of Dolly the sheep, Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, revealed that human clones could meet the same fate. Antinori and the other proponents were unfazed by such warnings. He dismissed the Dolly studies as "veterinary animal work."
According to Antinori, accurate prenatal screening can detect most defects, so bad embryos could be aborted. "Cloned sheep," he says, "have never been closely monitored for these defects." Even so, some sheep clones look perfectly healthy but suffer from nervous system disorders, respiratory ailments or other diseases after birth. Antinori admits that there is currently no way to test for these maladies. But he states that IVF and ICSI are much safer and more effective in humans than in livestock and that the same would hold true for cloning--a claim rejected by mainstream scientists. "Maybe they are culturing the animal embryos in an inappropriate way," he offers. "We have the expertise to do all that properly" in humans. (In January an NAS panel recommended a ban on human reproductive cloning but stood behind cloning to treat disease.)
Pinning Antinori down on specifics of his cloning bid--names, dates, places and such--is difficult: he becomes vague in his responses. His attempt, which has so far cost more than $300,000, will rely on anonymous private sources, mostly rich Asian and Arabian men, he says. The semiclandestine consortium, he insists, is a private agreement between him, Zavos and about 20 researchers of various nationalities whose identities and locations are kept secret as a precaution.
If Antinori is to be believed, he is far ahead of the rest of world. "We have obtained a cloned human embryo of 20 cells," he says, adding that the experiment was carried out somewhere in Asia. In contrast, Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., which last November reported having cloned human embryos (for therapeutic, not reproductive, purposes), reached only six cells. The reason for the difference, Antinori suggests, is that his approach takes the nuclei from epidermal cells instead of from fibroblasts, as ACT researchers did, and uses oocytes at different stages of the cell cycle. Without any experimental data, it is hard to see whether these differences really can boost the success rate.
Antinori's determination to clone threatens his current livelihood. In September he was expelled from A PART, an international association of private fertility clinics of which he was once vice president; the reason, in part, was his "disreputable conduct [on] reproductive cloning." The Italian Medical Association says it might revoke his license should he push ahead with his cloning plans. (It could penalize him now, because its code prohibits postmenopausal assisted reproduction.)
Still, Antinori is not about to abandon reproductive cloning: about 600 infertile couples in Italy and more than 6,000 in the U.S. have already signed up for the procedure, he says. And the media buzz has so far helped his daily practice. "He is expensive, but we came here because they say he's the best," explains a patient waiting anxiously while his wife undergoes an IVF procedure. The human imperative to procreate is sure to keep Antinori's waiting room filled--and cloned babies on the agenda.
--By SERGIO PISTOI
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Sergio Pistoi, who is based in Arezzo, Italy, profiled war zone surgeon Gino Strada in the January issue.
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