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WASHINGTON â€”  As details of their work remained murky, two research teams Tuesday defended their plans to clone human beings in the face of growing concerns that the practice would lead to deformed or unhealthy babies.

“I believe there is enough information today to proceed in human cloning. . . . It will be done. I am doing it,� said Brigitte Boisselier, director of Clonaid, which claims to be the world’s first human cloning company.

A second team, led by an Italian fertility doctor and a Kentucky researcher, gave mixed signals on its own work. One team leader said that there was no timetable to carry out cloning, while another said the work could begin next month and the first cloned child born late next year.

Both teams say they want to use cloning, the process that created Dolly the sheep from a single parent, to help people who cannot have children by other means. Boisselier is affiliated with a small religious group that also sees cloning as a tool to achieve eternal life.

The comments came as the marbled halls of the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government on scientific matters, were turned over to a forum on cloning that became part academic melee and part media circus.

Both research teams are working in secret and there is no way to assess the claims that they have the funding or expertise to carry off the project. Neither team said where it will conduct human cloning, which is illegal in much of Europe and would need Food and Drug Administration approval in the United States.

Nonetheless, public pronouncements from the two teams have drawn worldwide attention, with news camera crews pursuing the cloning advocates even into the academy’s bathrooms. To forestall cloning efforts, the House last week voted to criminalize human cloning, a measure that President Bush has said he would sign into law if approved by the Senate.

The two teams also came in for criticism from some of the world’s top names in science, who told a National Academy panel that human cloning cannot be done safely. The panel, which has no regulatory powers, plans to issue a report by October on the state of cloning science and on whether a moratorium on human cloning is warranted.

An array of scientists told the panel that cloning causes birth defects and unexplained deaths in animals. “At present there is no way to predict whether a given clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual,� said Rudolf Jaenisch, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alan Colman, research director of the Scottish company PPL Therapeutics, said cloning technology will surely mature and improve. “Practice makes perfect, but is it ethical to practice?� he asked. “I say it is not, in the human context.�

Cloning is a technique for producing a genetic twin of a living thing--an organism that starts life with the same genes as its parent.

In mammals, it entails taking DNA from an adult animal and inserting it into an egg cell from another animal. The egg then divides into an embryo. But where most embryos have genes from two parents, cloned embryos have genes from only one parent.

The embryo is then transferred to a surrogate mother and grown to term. The process has worked in cows, sheep, goats, mice and pigs, while ongoing attempts have failed so far with rabbits, rats, cats, dogs, monkeys and horses.

But even in species that have been cloned, the process often fails.

One reason for failure, said Jaenisch, is that genes taken from an adult animal need to be “reprogrammed� so that they act like the genes that guide the growth of an embryo. This is a complicated process affecting thousands of genes, he said, and it often goes awry.

The result is a genetic defect that can cause the embryo to die. He said it is impossible to screen for these genetic problems.

Jonathan Hill, an animal researcher at Cornell University, said a separate problem is that cloned embryos often attach poorly to the mother’s uterus, depriving them of nutrients they need to thrive. “They starve. . . . They just fade,� Hill said.

Colman, the Scottish researcher, said that 10% or fewer of cloning attempts succeed, but that once an animal is born, it tends to grow normally. However, Jaenisch said he believed that many cloned animals have subtle brain defects or other problems that mean little in animals but could be devastating in a child.

These scientists clashed several times with the cloning advocates during panel discussions. Boisselier said she had developed a way to test the health of 10 genes in cloned nonhuman embryos, but Alan Trounson, an Australian fertility pioneer, called the claim “ludicrous.�

Panayiotis Zavos, the Kentucky researcher leading one of the cloning teams, said that a three-decade history of human fertility research would lead to better results with people than with animals. He also stressed that cloning would help infertile people have children.

“I do believe that it’s a fundamental right to reproduce the way you want,� Boisselier said. “If you want to reproduce by mixing your genes with someone else’s, you have the right. If you want to reproduce yourself by cloning your genes you have the right.�

She said there is “huge demand� for the service.

Boisselier said a team of Clonaid scientists is working in a lab overseas. An American lawyer, who wanted to clone a dead son, had put up funding for the venture but recently withdrew.

Boisselier said she could not discuss whether that development forced Clonaid to close a U.S. lab it had opened, or whether the company has new funding.

Clonaid was founded in 1997 by the Raelian Movement, an obscure religious group based in Geneva and the Canadian province of Quebec. The group believes that scientists from another planet created mankind by manipulating DNA, and that some humans will achieve eternal life through cloning.

The company was founded as a post office box in the Bahamas, but it no longer operates there. Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion and until recently was a visiting professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

The Italian fertility specialist, Dr. Severino Antinori, said he had no schedule for producing cloned children. Previously, he had told reporters that the work would start in November.

But his partner, Zavos, told reporters that his team might try to begin producing cloned human embryos within 30 days in a laboratory at an undisclosed location. The embryos will be studied, he said, and healthy ones will be transferred to surrogate mothers in an attempt to produce children.

“The embryos will not be transferred until they can withstand the scrutiny that we will apply,� Zavos said. “We plan to probably transfer the first healthy cloned embryos in 2002 and maybe at the end of 2002 we will have the first baby born.�

The Cyprus-born Zavos is a specialist in male reproduction who held an academic post for two decades in the animal sciences department at the University of Kentucky. In April, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Lexington, Ky., hospital cited “unethical and illegal behavior� by Zavos when it severed an employment agreement with him in 1994. Zavos was also cited by a university panel for violating research rules. A former lawyer for Zavos was disbarred in 1998, in part for helping Zavos shield assets to avoid paying a jury award to a former employee.

Antinori is an established fertility specialist known for pushing the frontiers of his field. He received wide attention for helping a number of women become pregnant after menopause, including a 62-year-old woman.