If Italy is the Wild West of fertility treatment, Severino Antinori is its Buffalo Bill. Exploiting the absence of a law on IVF treatment, he shot to fame in 1994 by giving the world its first "granny birth". His patient, a 62-year-old farmer's wife was the oldest woman at that time to have had a child.
He has since gone from one controversy to the next. Hans Evers, president of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology accused him of "blatant abuses of reproductive medicine", and of "stepping outside the boundaries of what is acceptable".
The son of a vet from a small town in the Abruzzo region, Dr Antinori found his vocation in the early 1970s when he heard a lecture given by Patrick Steptoe, one of two British scientists behind the birth of the world's first "test-tube baby". Though the short, moustachioed, legendarily explosive Dr Antinori is frequently accused of overstating his abilities, his credentials are impressive. He has had numerous articles published in respected journals such as The Lancet and is widely credited with pioneering intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, a breakthrough in treating male infertility.
After several "granny births" he leapt back into the headlines in 1999 by offering to create made-to-order millennium babies. Several were indeed reported to have been delivered by caesarean section on January 1 2000. But the biggest furore arose from his purported efforts to clone a human. In 2002, he told a reporter that a woman on a programme he was running was eight weeks pregnant with a cloned baby. His partner, a Greek-American scientist, Dr Panos Zavos, promptly ended their collaboration. Dr Antinori later insisted that a woman in his care was more than eight months pregnant with a cloned child. But the claim was never substantiated.
Dr Antinori, whose practice is less than 100 metres from the Vatican walls, bitterly criticised a bill approved by the Italian parliament in 2004 which filled the legal vacuum surrounding IVF with some of Europe's most restrictive legislation. How he stayed within that law to arrange the pregnancy of a 63 year-old woman is not the least of the intriguing questions that surround him.
