Brushing aside international outrage and charges that he is embracing Hitler's vision of a superior race, an Italian scientist pressed ahead Tuesday with plans to create the world's first human clone.
Embryologist Severino Antinori dismissed the criticism as "stupid" in an interview published Tuesday in the Italian newspaper La Republicca ahead of his trip to the United States where he will announce the medical undertaking.
Antinori, who rose to prominence in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old woman have a child, will set out to create the first human clone with assistance from 200 women who volunteered to take part in the experiments.
The scientist maintains that his goal was to help couples suffering from reproduction problems by allowing them to have healthy children.
"I will not make children who are carbon copies of their parents, but (medically) perfect children," he told the daily La Republicca, noting that 75 million people worldwide suffer from infertility.
Antinori said accusations that his plan constituted a breach in medical ethics were "completely stupid and cannot stop me." He hopes to begin the experiments in November.
The announcement at the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington later Tuesday comes amid calls for worldwide legislation against human cloning and threats by Italian authorities to revoke his medical license.
The highly controversial issue of cloning has polarized the scientific community since geneticists first successfully cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997, and Antinori has only added fuel to the fire.
The experiment -- which he will announce at 1700 GMT -- has been roundly attacked, with a French bioethicist and doctor Tuesday calling them "crimes against humanity," and accusing the doctor of being immoral.
Jean-Francois Mattei, who also heads the Liberal Democratic faction in French parliament, told French RTL radio that the United Nations should tackle the issue.
Anyone who violated laws against the practice of cloning -- which is already outlawed in several countries around the world, including Italy -- should face sanctions, he added.
At the Vatican, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger compared Antinori's plans to Hitler and charged that governments should not support such "questionable practices."
In interviews with several Italian newspapers, the cardinal said "copying children, for reasons other than treating sterility, is Nazi madness."
US President George W. Bush said Monday he opposes any efforts to clone a human being.
"If the purpose is cloning a human being, the president is opposed to any effort to do that," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said in Crawford, Texas.
Doubts remain however over whether experiments on 200 people will result in a successful human clone.
Professor Ian Wilmut, who led the team of scientists that created Dolly, says it took 277 attempts before they could successfully clone a sheep.
Objections to cloning experiments focus around the ethical argument that such tests should simply not be carried out on humans, with others pointing to the level of abnormalities reported in experiments on animals.
Antinori is part of an international panel on reproductive cloning in humans which includes researchers Panayiotis Zavos and Brigitte Boisselier, who also advocate experiments in human cloning.
The daylong panel at the NAS, broadcast live on the Internet, will also debate the cloning of animals, stem cell research, reproductive technology, and other scientific issues surrounding cloning -- ROME (AFP)
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