London

Antinori: may generate 'an unruly scrum'. Credit: AP

Several of the world's leading experts on reproductive biology have withdrawn from a forthcoming conference in Monte Carlo, saying it has effectively been taken over by Severino Antinori, the Italian doctor best known for his plans to clone humans.

The conference, set for 11–14 October, was originally planned as the third world congress of the International Association of Private Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinics and Laboratories (A PART), a grouping of institutions that conduct fertility treatments.

But on 9 September, the board of A PART withdrew its support for the meeting, saying that Antinori, director of the International Associated Research Institute for Human Reproduction in Rome, and one of the conference organizers, had taken over financial responsibility for the meeting and excluded its other organizers from decision-making.

A PART had hoped that up to 500 fertility clinicians from around the world would attend the meeting. But by 9 September, 41 of the expected 77 speakers had withdrawn, says Wilfried Feichtinger of the Institute for Sterility Treatment in Vienna, and president of A PART.

Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997, is among those who cancelled plans to attend the meeting, says Harry Griffin, an assistant director at the institute.

“We viewed the meeting as a way to put the evidence on the limitations of cloning technology directly to the assisted-reproduction community, and create a measured approach to the media,” Griffin says. “But when Professor Antinori is involved in media affairs they usually degenerate into an unruly scrum.”

The Italian doctor “has turned it into an Antinori congress”, says Peter Brinsden, a board member of A PART and medical director of Bourn Hall Clinic, a private infertility clinic near Cambridge in England. “We realized it was going to become a publicity circus.”

Antinori responded by saying that the conference would be successful and conducted at a very high scientific level.