For the past few days the news has been buzzing about the first human clone having been produced. Many of you have written in alerting us to this. We took a cautionary tone with the story: clones have been claimed before in the past few months (one unverified report had "hundreds" of clone embryos gestating in a lab in China) but nothing to prove their validity.

But now, for the first time, it can safely and accurately be said that a human being has been cloned, and that clone is now well on its way to full term. Here's an excerpt from a story that Chewrocka forwarded to us:

LONDON (Reuters Health) - A woman taking part in a controversial human cloning programme is 8 weeks pregnant, Britain's New Scientist magazine reported on its Web site on Friday (www.newscientist.com/news).

It cited Italy's outspoken fertility expert Severino Antinori, one of two specialists leading the effort, as saying: "One woman among thousands of infertile couples in the programme is 8 weeks pregnant."

If confirmed, the pregnancy will cause uproar, New Scientist said. Many countries have banned reproductive cloning and most prominent scientists have warned of the high risk of severe birth defects, as well as very high rates of miscarriage. The technology is also opposed by many on ethical grounds.

Richard Gardner, an expert on early mammalian embryo development who also chaired the UK Royal Society's working group on therapeutic cloning, told the magazine that such a pregnancy would be "grossly irresponsible given the current state of knowledge, even aside from any ethical issues."

Antinori claims to be able to screen the embryos to reduce the risk of abnormalities but Gardner said, "There's no way you can do it--you could only spot gross changes in chromosomes or in the number of chromosomes." There can be single gene defects, he added, and problems with imprinting, which can lead to cancer as well as malformations.

Dr. Antinori at first refused to confirm or deny that he had been successful with the cloning. However in another story in today's Sunday Telegraph he not only confirms the cloning, he also divulges much about the background of the clone:

THE world's first cloned human embryo is the son of a rich Arab, according to claims made by Severino Antinori, the Italian fertility specialist.

Dr Antinori said that the embryo was the clone of a VIP and that he had been experimenting to produce human clones "in an Islamic country".

The doctor, who pledged with Panos Zavos, of the Andrology Institute of America in Lexington, Kentucky, to attempt to clone a baby by the end of 2001, caused outrage last week when he told a scientific meeting in the United Arab Emirates that a woman patient was eight weeks pregnant with a clone.

His claim has met with disbelief from infertility specialists worldwide, coupled with concern that such a pregnancy could result in a severely malformed baby, as has been the case in animals.

Dr Antinori, however, has told Giancarlo Calzolari, a friend and science reporter at Il Tempo newspaper in Rome, that the pregnancy is real and that he has a "limitless supply of money" for his experiments. Mr Calzolari said that he had been contacted by the doctor on Friday.

"He told me it was a clone of an important, wealthy personality," Mr Calzolari said. "However, he was vague when I asked him the name of the woman and to at least describe the father. He would only say that he was a grosso personaggio [a big cheese].

We've also read that to produce this one clone embryo, several thousands of embryos either failed to come to term, or were otherwise destroyed. This part of the cloning has been described as "normal".

Too bad real life isn't as clean and clear-cut as it is in fantasy...