By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jan 21 2003 (IPS)

The sensational announcement last month that a human clone is to be born in a private clinic by January 15 in Serbia caused an avalanche of denials by local experts and health ministry officials.

"Our symposium on artificial human reproduction was abused for a sensation and we’re sorry that such a thing happened," Dr Drazen Milacic, head of the Yugoslav Association for Fertility and Sterility said.

In December, the Association hosted a symposium on the problems of artificial human reproduction, attended by more than 250 local and foreign experts.

Among them was the controversial Italian gynaecologist Severino Antinori (57), who shot to notoriety in 1994 when he succeeded in helping a 63-year-old post-menopausal Italian woman become pregnant through fertilisation treatment administered at his Rome clinic.

While in Belgrade, Antinori was interviewed by local media. In one of the interviews he announced that "Serbia will be one of three countries which will go down in history" due to the assumed January 15 birth of a cloned baby. "I must say that I would clone only Serbs in the future, as they are able to endure everything," he added.

"The Italian specialist obviously abused our hospitality for his own publicity purposes," said Dr Marta Savic, one of the organisers of the symposium. "It’s one thing what he tells journalists for his own promotion and the other thing is that, before the participants of the conference, he said nothing about the cloning of humans".

Antinori’s announcement came only days before the controversial Cloneaid group announced the birth of the first human clone by a mother in the U.S.

But Antinori’s interviews caused disturbance among the authorities too.

Serbian Health Ministry issued a decree banning any experiments that would lead to cloning of humans. The decree became an annex of the existing Law on Human Reproduction.

"Serbia is a country where some 400,000 people are treated for infertility," Health Minister Tomica Milosavljevic said. "Our laws are not against artificial insemination or test tube babies, but cloning is something that touches the very substance of nature."

However, Antinori’s announcement was followed with an unprecedented media search for a place where the allegedly cloned baby would be born.

As he mentioned "a private clinic" for such an event, more than 140 private gynaecologist practices around Serbia became the targets. Three big private clinics denied they had anything to do with the specialist, although they treat sterile couples and are involved in artificial insemination.

"The news was really sensational," said Ivana Ivkovic, an ethics professor from the University of the southern Serbian town of Nis. "But sensation is one thing and reality another. A simple look at our hospitals or private clinics shows that there are no facilities for such a demanding experiment."

Serbian health system has the feet of clay. The decade of wars and isolation under Slobodan Milosevic, who fell from power two years ago, led to economic disaster that influenced all segments of life, including the health care system. Private practices are barely better that the state run ones.

In the meantime, human cloning has became a topic of debate among people. A survey by Belgrade office of Marten Board International showed that 93 percent of Serbs opposed it, while only four percent said it was a "positive thing".

A survey in neighbouring Croatia, that became an independent state in 1991, gave almost similar results. According to the weekly ‘Globus’, some 71 percent of Croats were against human cloning.

Yet, if human cloning was a safe procedure, 43 percent of Croats would like to see a clone of the most famous Croatian and former Yugoslav basketball player Drazen Petrovic. He died in a car accident several years ago.

Second on the list (33 percent) was the father of modern Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who died three years ago. Third was Nikola Tesla, a Croatian Serb, a scientist who died 60 years ago. His work in the United States with Thomas Edison led to the creation of electricity generating turbines.

In the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, more than two thirds of people surveyed by a daily newspaper ‘Nova Makedonija’ said that they would appreciate a clone of Josip Broz Tito.

Tito ruled former Yugoslavia since World War II through 1980. The period is still viewed by many as the happiest in the former Balkans Yugoslav federation that fell apart in 1991, 11 years after Tito’s death.

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