DOCTORS and medical groups yesterday reacted with outrage to news that an Italian fertility specialist is on the brink of cloning the first human baby.

Dr Severino Antinori, who runs a fertility clinic in Rome, has been quoted in an Arab newspaper as claiming that one of his patients is eight weeks' pregnant with a cloned embryo.

He refused to comment, but in March 2001 said he hoped to produce a viable cloned embryo for implantation within two years. Seven species of mammal have been cloned, including sheeps, cats and most recently rabbits.

Asked at a conference in Dubai about his efforts to clone humans, Antinori was quoted as saying: 'One woman among the thousands of infertile couples in the programme is eight weeks' pregnant.'

Doctors have reacted with scepticism and outrage, but admitted human cloning was inevitable unless there was a worldwide ban.

Professor Rudolf Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: 'I find it appalling that people do this where the outcome is predictable that it will not be a normal baby. It is using humans as guinea pigs.'

Dr Michael Wilks, chairman of the British Medical Association's ethics committee, said: 'It is to be condemned. It's a universal view that we are totally opposed to reproductive cloning. Antinori is not an ethical or welcome member of the worldwide medical community.'

But Ronald Green, director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in the US, said it was unlikely that an eight-week-old pregnancy would lead to a birth: 'The record in animal cloning has been so disastrous in terms of foetal survival that I would hesitate to think that this pregnancy will necessarily go to term.'

Antinori refused to say where the pregnant woman was from, but he works with women from around the world. He said last year that he had three or four British women on his shortlist who would be implanted with 10 cloned embryos.

So far all cloned animals have suffered a range of severe disorders, many dying prematurely. The technique is so hit and miss that in other species hundreds of embryos have had to be implanted before one has been born alive.

Doctors oppose human cloning because of concern about the welfare of the child and as it stokes public opposition to cloning of individual cells as a way of treating otherwise incurable diseases.

'There are no benefits of cloned human beings, just harm. There are also concerns that we have no idea what the psychological implications are of being created,' said Wilks.

Cloning humans is illegal in Britain. Antinori is also banned from cloning humans in Italy or the US and is thought to be using Israel and Cyprus for his experiments.