Scientists busy trying to map all the genes in creatures ranging from bacteria to humans think they are close to figuring out how to build an artificial life form--from genes.

Just as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein used bits of corpses to make a monster, Dr. Craig Venter hopes to salvage DNA from dead bacteria to construct his artificial bug. "Shelley would have loved this," Dr. Venter laughed when asked about the comparison.

Before he went any further, Dr. Venter said he wanted advice from experts on ethics and religion. "We are asking whether it is ethical to synthetically make life," he said.

Edinburgh researchers behind the cloning of Dolly the sheep are in talks to develop ways of cloning human cells for transplant organs. Scientists are planning to collaborate on a revolutionary "body repair kit." Cloned cells would provide a limitless supply for a transplant patient and therefore avoid the need to give anti-rejection drugs.

With this new discovery, scientists believe they will be able to take tissue from a newborn baby and clone, freeze and store cells for transplant operations should they be needed in the future.

Peter Garrret, research director for the anti-abortion charity Life, called the new technology "a form of cannibalism."

The Council of Europe has voted for a moratorium on clinical tests of animal organ transplants into human beings. The decision will be a heavy blow to researchers working on the technique, known as "xenotransplantation". It also means the global shortage of human donor organs will have to be solved some other way. Millions of dollars have already been poured into research on transplanting animal organs into humans.

While not banning the idea of animal organ transplants altogether, the council of Europe voted to ban clinical tests on real patients in Europe - and wants to see that ban extended worldwide. As a result, any trials of the transplants, which might have gone ahead in Europe this year, have been indefinitely postponed until more is known about the potential hazards. The council expressed concern about the ethics of animal organ transplants, both for humans, and for animal welfare.

A controversial American biologist who plans to clone humans announced that he is setting up a base in Japan, where laws do not prohibit such research. Richard Seed, a Chicago-born Harvard graduate who has no medical license, has revealed that he had located a site and partial funding for an animal cloning laboratory and a human fertility clinic.

The facilities are seen as a stepping stone towards human cloning, which Mr. Seed, an expert in the field for more than 30 years, claims is possible within two years.

Described by former colleagues as brilliant but slightly crazy, Mr. Seed caused an uproar earlier when he announced plans to clone himself. Seed has predicted that once the procedure is established, more than 500 human clones will be produced every year.

Newspaper editorials have expressed horror at the prospect of human cloning, and it is far from certain that Japan will welcome the international media glare that will come with hosting Mr. Seed's experiments. Mr. Seed, however, insists that human cloning is inevitable.

Earlier this year he said: "God made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA are the first serious steps in becoming one with God."

Reuters reported that scientists busy trying to map all the genes in creatures ranging from bacteria to humans think they are on the verge of figuring out how to build an artificial life form -- from genes. Just as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein used bits of corpses to make a monster, Dr. J. Craig Venter hopes to salvage DNA from dead bacteria to construct his artificial bug. Their guinea pig is a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. It lives in the human genital tract and lungs, causing no known disease, but has the distinction of having fewer genes than any other organism mapped so far. While humans have about 80,000 genes, this bug gets along fine with just 470.

Even if they could make a new life, Venter's team still might not understand just what they did, because life is much more complex than they thought. It had been hoped that after a few organisms had been sequenced, many genes would arise that every living creature has in common. After all, everything has many of the same basic functions -- processing food, respiring, building cell membranes to keep themselves together. But it turns out that different creatures use different genes for these same functions.

The scientist who created Dolly the cloned sheep may move into human cloning next, AFP quoted BBC. The BBC report said Ian Wilmut was in talks with a company funding a team expected to begin an embryo clone project within weeks, for therapeutic research. The BBC report said Wilmut was in negotiations with the Geron Corp., a U.S. company funding embryo cloning for medical purposes.

It said Roger Pedersen, at the University of California in San Francisco, was expected soon to start making human embryo clones for stem cell research, backed by Geron. The idea is to use the nuclear transfer technology pioneered at the Roslin Institute to create clones. It involves transferring the nucleus of the cell to be cloned, which can come from any part of the body, to an unfertilized egg whose own nucleus has been removed. An embryo created from this egg then contains all the genetic information originally in the donor cell.