While an executive of the company claiming to have cloned a human is expected to testify in a Florida courtroom today, some Penn State experts doubt the company's credibility.

Thomas Kaenzig, vice president of Clonaid, is scheduled to appear at a civil hearing along with the alleged mother of a clone. Kaenzig said Monday that his lawyers were working to have the hearing cancelled.

Kaenzig's reluctance to appear in court is another factor in a series of events causing many to doubt the existence of the clone. Penn State professors familiar with the topic of cloning say there is too much hype surrounding this issue and that Clonaid is most likely incapable of cloning a human.

In a telephone interview, Kaenzig would not comment on whether the mother of the clone would appear in court should the hearing proceed, nor would he comment on whether he had seen the clone.

Nancy Tuana, professor of philosophy, specializes in the ethical and moral issues surrounding science. She said the technology involved in cloning is not advanced enough to safely create a human clone. The concern of scientists, she said, is that attempts at cloning are very likely to cause disabilities and birth defects.

"Clonaid is claiming that they can clone without these problems. Were that true, and I don't think it's true, that would overturn many of the current objections to cloning," Tuana said.

Robert Proctor, professor of the history of science, worked with one of the first scientists to experiment with cloning more than 50 years ago. The scientist's work involved taking a frog's skin cell and implanting it into an egg. Proctor said the animals turn out to be unhealthy in many cases of cloning.

"It is possible that the genes are not perfectly contained in every part of the body," Proctor said.

Kaenzig said the difficulties that arise when cloning some animals do not apply to humans.

"Science today is too politically correct," he said. "You have to be a pioneer."

Tuana said Clonaid lacks the skill and technology to clone a human, but in the future cloning may be looked at in the same way we see in-vitro fertilization. Proctor held similar views, saying that while Clonaid's claims are implausible, human cloning is not.

"It's important to realize that the Raelians are really crazy; they do dress up in space suits," he said. "But if they haven't cloned a human -- and it's highly unlikely that they have -- someone probably will. Cloning is not some new magical thing; it's just like producing a biological twin."

The Raelians are a religious group that believes aliens created the human race through cloning. Their leader, Raël, founded Clonaid in 1997.

Kaenzig said not everyone at Clonaid is Raelian and that he did not know why the media choose to focus so much on the religion.