Fireworks erupted in Rome last week at an international workshop on human and therapeutic cloning as the meeting's organizers clashed with their critics and the press.

Held at La Sapienza, Rome's largest university, the workshop attracted as many journalists as scientists, and was attended by few of the established experts in cloning technology. Instead, it drew criticism from Italian researchers who feared that it was likely to damage the reputation of Italian biomedical research.

Controversial concept: meeting organizer Severino Antinori is preparing to clone a human being. Credit: GAMMA

The workshop was organized by Rome-based obstetrician Severino Antinori, Panayiotis Zavos, a fertility researcher from Kentucky, and their new partner, Avi Ben-Abraham, an Israeli physician. The three announced that they would set a date for their first human cloning attempt at a meeting planned for Monaco in October. The experiment is set to take place in an unnamed southern Mediterranean country, they said.

But no details were forthcoming in Rome of the technologies that the trio plans to use to ensure an acceptably high rate of healthy births. Zavos spoke only of reducing errors by using good “quality control” of embryo selection.

Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, head of the Scottish research team that cloned Dolly the sheep, did not attend the meeting but said afterwards that he doubts that such a reduction is currently feasible. Wilmut noted that low success rates are apparent in each of the five species that have already been cloned, including rhesus monkeys, in which only 4% of reconstructed embryos survive. “We are good at selection,” he said, “but our survival rates [in farm animals] are still very low and most pregnancy failures occur just before term, which would be devastating and cruel for humans.”

At one point during the meeting, according to several observers, Antinori had to be physically restrained from trying to prevent a young doctor from speaking out against the workshop. The doctor said that a conference on human cloning, which has been barred as unethical by several international organizations and governments, should not have been allowed in a public building, still less in a renowned university such as La Sapienza.

At another point Antinori warned journalists that he was successful in suing those whose reporting he considered defamatory or incorrect. In the week running up to the conference, Antinori brought actions against at least two newspaper writers, including Carlo Redi, a professor at the University of Pavia, and a member of the Italian government advisory committee on stem cells, who writes newspaper columns.

Redi believes that the workshop threatens the standing of Italian biomedical science, which, he points out, is already suffering from the so-called Di Bella affair, in which an octogenarian doctor notoriously proclaimed a cure for cancer (see Nature 391, 217; 1998).

Redi claims that the announcement of the workshop in February prompted Umberto Veronesi, the health minister, to ban all cloning work in both humans and animals.

And according to Wilmut, the plan to press ahead with human cloning could contribute to a backlash outside of Italy against important research, such as therapeutic cloning.