Richard Seed said his wife, Gloria, has agreed to carry an embryo that would be created by combining the nucleus of one of his cells with a donor egg, The Boston Globe reported in its Sunday edition.

Seed declined to give his wife's age, but described her as "post-menopausal''. He refused to give details of how the pregnancy would work.

Seed's plan to clone humans drew fire from people who said it was immoral and carries the risk of still births or abnormal foetuses.

``I have decided to clone myself first to defuse the criticism that I'm taking advantage of desperate women with a procedure that's not proven,'' the 69-year-old said on Saturday at a meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, a group of academic researchers.

Seed has three Harvard degrees, including a PhD, but no medical degree, no money andno institutional backing.

California and Michigan have banned human cloning and dozens of other states are considering bans. Mainstream scientists have unofficially agreed to a five-year moratorium on the practice.

Nonetheless, Seed says he has been invited to set up research laboratories in two other countries and that he will move his human clone clinic to Mexico if Congress forbids his research. He has vowed to produce a pregnancy with a human clone within two-and-a-half years.

Cloning would be the first step in discovering immortality, Seed said. He had received hundreds of calls, including calls from parents of dying children who want to clone them, he said.