JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - A South African doctor and his team are ready to clone humans, and are applying to a local university's ethics committee for permission to go ahead with the procedure, it was reported here Saturday.
Four South African women desperate to have children were willing to allow Dr Mohamed Cassim to attempt to create replicas of themselves or their husbands, the Saturday Star reported.
The report said expertise and equipment to replicate genetic material and create human clones was available at a Johannesburg fertility clinic.
Cassim told the newspaper: "Getting the genetic material into an egg to produce a clone is easy. My son could do it. With the technology we have in our laboratory, the procedure is as easy as fiddling with some controls."
A South African health department spokesman said he believed cloning was illegal in terms of the Human Tissues Act.
"Genetic manipulation of sperm or eggs is not permitted. Cloning, according to our interpretation, falls under genetic manipulation," Morris Conradie said.
Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma's office said she would not be tackling the issue, as South Africa had more important matters to deal with "like the backlog in providing basic healthcare services".
The South African breakthrough comes amid fierce debate in the international community about the ethics of cloning.
Scientists in Scotland have already cloned a sheep, Dolly, from a cell of a six-year-old ewe.
Cassim is reportedly in partnership with a Danish fertility clinic and has received financial aid for his work in in-vitro reproduction -- but not for cloning.
Cassim told the newspaper he was opposed to cloning without strict regulations and state control, and felt cloning should only be used to assist infertile couples who wanted children genetically linked to them.
"In certain circumstances, cloning should be permitted," Cassim said. "As a comparison: the atom bomb was bad, but atomic energy is not bad, depending on how you use it."
Cassim is preparing a detailed protocol for the ethics committee of the University of the Witwatersrand in an effort to clone children as a research project, and would like to conduct the research with academics from other universities.
"The ethics committee would like to see a lot of background information, particularly on the risks involved to parents and children. I expect to submit detailed documents to the ethics committee shortly," he said.
"There is huge resistance worldwide to cloning, just as there was when test-tube babies were first created, so I am expecting resistance here.
"I have to try to get permission because I feel strongly about helping desperate couples who would like their own children and have no other alternative," he said.
Explaining the procedure, Cassim said sperm would not be required for reproduction. If a couple want a daughter, the genetic makeup of the woman is used. Genetic material from the male partner is taken if a son is desired.
"The key lies with whether the egg will cleave, or start dividing to produce an embryo," he said.
"We may have to transfer genetic material into eggs many times before we get an embryo. Scientists and doctors are still not quite sure what the trigger is for eggs to divide."
Cassim did not believe there was a South African law against cloning but was applying to the ethics committee as he did not want to "lose my licence in the event of the South African Medical and Dental Council ruling at a later stage that what I have done is unethical".
He said some people believed that cloning was "like playing God. I believe that cloning is not about defying the laws of nature -- it's facilitating the laws of nature."
Copyright AFP 1998. All rights reserved.