PEOPLE will be cloned and laws banning the practice will do little to slow progress towards that milestone, experts in reproductive medicine are predicting.
Richard Seed, the Chicago physicist who stunned the world last week by saying he would open a cloning clinic, is widely seen as a vocal maverick who is unlikely to clone a person in the foreseeable future. But mainstream researchers are quietly developing techniques on primates and human egg cells which should ultimately bring them to the brink of human cloning.
While the researchers involved don't intend to start cloning people, private reproductive clinics will then be tempted to cross that line. "I understand there's already a bit of a race among cutting-edge IVF clinics to get into this technology," says Don Wolf of the Oregon Regional Primate Center in Beaverton, who works on the cloning of primates.
The technology that underpins cloning is ...
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