Severino told the RAI network late Tuesday that two of the women were in former Soviet republics, while the third was in an Islamic country. The three were nine weeks, seven weeks and three weeks into their pregnancies.

He did not name the countries concerned or provide further details. "I have absolutely nothing to do with these pregnancies," he told participants at a debate on human cloning.

Earlier this month the magazine New Scientist quoted Antinori as saying that a woman taking part in his human cloning programme was now pregnant.

At the time Italian Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia warned that if the story were true, "it's a leap into the unknown medically, a completely illegal act from the law's point of view, and an aberration from a moral point of view."

In his remarks on Tuesday, the gynecologist denied any involvement in the reported pregnancy. He said however that other experiments in human cloning were also being conducted in the United States and China.

Antinori, 57, 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.

A Cloned Embryo, Even An Aborted One, Could Be A Source Of Stem Cells Washington (AFP) Apr 22, 2002 A cloned embryo, even one aborted in the early stages of its cellular division, could be a source of stem cells, according the work by British researchers to appear Tuesday in the United States.

Researchers at the Wellcome Cancer Research Institute of Cambridge, in Britain, showed that a cluster of undifferentiated cells which results from an aborted cloned frog embryo is reusable to produce muscle, bone or skin tissue for another frog.

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers explain that they isolated the nucleus of frog cells carrying a protein made fluorescent in their DNA.

The researchers then injected the nucleus carrying the fluorescent marker into the empty egg of another frog.

Researchers later extracted the cells stocks from embryos aborted after 24 hours of cellular division, and grafted these cells on developing embryos that had no marked cells.

The researchers discovered the cells with the fluorescent marker within the fabric forming the muscle, bone and skin of the tadpole that grew from the embryo.

The researchers said that if a cloned embryo does not succeed in developing beyond the first stage of cellular division, its DNA can nevertheless be transmitted via its cells stocks established on a viable embryo.

"It may be that cells from nonviable cloned human embryos, which could not survive independently, may be useful for research and therapeutic purposes," the researchers concluded.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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