Washington - A private consortium of international doctors has launched a major effort to, within the next two years, clone a human for "therapeutic purposes" reserved solely for infertile couples, a scientist said yesterday.
"The effort will be to assist couples that have no other alternatives to reproduce and want to have their own biological child and not somebody else's eggs or sperm," said Dr Panos Zavos of the University of Kentucky. The resulting child would then be an identical reproduction of its mother or father, depending on the genetic donor.
"The technology will be made available to the world to use," Dr Zavos said. "This association of scientists will develop guidelines and other means with which the technology can be under control and cannot be indiscriminately applied for anybody who wants to clone themselves."