SCIENCE: BRAVE NEW BABIES

The ability to create baby Jack or baby Jill opens a high-tech can of worms. While the advances have received kudos from grateful families, they also raise loaded ethical questions. Even fertility specialists are divided over whether choosing a male or female embryo is acceptable. What's next on the slippery slope of modern reproductive medicine? Eye color? Height? Intelligence? Could picking one gender over the other become the 21st century's form of sex discrimination? Or, as in China and India, upset the ratio of males to females? Many European countries already forbid sex selection; should there be similar regulations in the United States? In South Korea?

Some countries are beginning to clamp down even on less-controversial fertility procedures which have been extended to morally questionable lengths. Over the past two decades Italy, perhaps more than any other country, has been known as the "Wild West" of assisted fertility. Several clinics in Rome have created "house conception" labs where couples go, essentially, to copulate, while doctors intervene at crucial moments with swabs, lotions and injections to help nature along. No doctor or clinic, though, tops gynecological maverick Dr. Severino Antinori of Rome. Among his most notable accomplishments: in 1994 he helped a 62-year-old woman become the oldest to give birth. He's been known to harvest eggs from women in the Balkans or Sicily and market them for their genes, which confer blonde hair or olive skin. And he's now trying to be first to clone a human.

The British and Italian medical boards have questioned Antinori's ethics, but he doesn't see what's wrong with helping women conceive. "These women come to me when they have nowhere else to go, and I help where I can," he says. "Every woman has a right to have a child." The Vatican, which calls his work "horrible and grotesque," pressured the Italian Parliament to pass new laws in December outlawing surrogate parenthood and IVF for elderly couples. As the laws take effect over the next few months, they'll put an end to a booming industry that caters to Europeans seeking to circumvent similarly strict laws in their home countries.

That in turn has prompted a minor panic at Italy's 2,500 fertility clinics, which will have to scale back the range of services they offer. Loretta Falcone, a 41-year-old living near Milan, has struggled with various fertility treatments for a few years without success. In December her doctors said that IVF was her last remaining option. But soon the new laws will limit the number of eggs that can be harvested to three for each patient and require doctors to implant all viable embryos. If she can't have the procedure done before the laws take effect in a few weeks, she's considering having the embryos implanted in Kiev.

Italy isn't the only place where infertility is a hot issue. In the United States, the religious right, which opposes abortion and just about any tampering with reproduction, exerts steady pressure for new laws. Two weeks ago President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics discussed proposals for possible legislation that would ban the buying and selling of human embryos. --While the council's current recommendations don't limit IVF or gender selection, the goals are clear: the government should clamp down before technology goes too far. "Even though people have strong differences of opinion on some issues," says council chair and leading bioethicist Leon Kass, "all of us have a stake in keeping human reproduction human."

Even fertility-related research has lately been on the run. Scientists in the United States, for instance, have chafed under the federal prohibition against using government funds for research on human embryos, including for such nonreproductive purposes as harvesting stem cells or therapeutic cloning. In recent years, a team of U.S. researchers developed a technique for transplanting the nucleus from one fertilized human egg cell to another egg cell--a procedure that could allow an older woman, whose eggs have passed their use-by date, to "borrow" the egg of a younger woman. Unlike with a typical donor egg, though, the older woman would be able to pass along her genetic traits to her offspring. The scientists wanted to pursue the technique in the United States, but because it was too similar to techniques of nuclear transfer used in cloning, they were forced to go elsewhere. Thinking that they'd have better luck in China, where there's little public pressure to curtail human embryonic work, the American scientists persuaded Zhuang Guanglun, a fertility specialist at Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, to take up the research. Last October, the team reported that they'd used the technique to help a 30-year-old Chinese woman, who had never been able to carry a pregnancy full term, give birth to triplets.