In May 2006 it was announced that 62-year-old East Sussex child psychiatrist, Patricia Rashbrook, was seven months pregnant after being treated by Antinori, who said that 62 or 63 was the upper limit for IVF in healthy women.
Josephine Quintavalle, from Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE), accused Rashbrook of selfishness and said it would be extremely difficult for a child to have a mother who is as old as a grandmother.
In November 2002, Antinori announced that he had successfully used cloning to induce pregnancy in three women, with the birth of the first child expected in January 2003.
The claim was refuted by Professor Lorraine Young of the Roslin Institute following her pioneering work with Doctor Ian Wilmut which culminated in the creation of Molly and Dolly, the worlds first cloned mammals.
Young had discovered that the reason cloning was an inherently flawed technique was due to the process scrambling the positioning of DNA-associated methyl molecules which controlled the timing of DNA expression.
He had recently hired a Spanish nurse at his clinic, and then diagnosed her with an ovarian cyst for the sole purpose of harvesting her eggs without her knowledge.