SYDNEY - A retired Australian multimillionaire renowned for supporting radical causes has advertised his willingness to find funding for human cloning projects - a willingness that extends to investing his own money in promising projects.

Paget Sayers advertised in the Australian media last week, stating that funding was available for “human cloning research.“

Commenting on the advertisement when contacted by BioWorld International, he said he and friends could initially arrange about A$2 million to A$3 million worth of funding, but that more money could be found from other sources for promising projects.

Sayers emphasized he was not talking about cloning whole humans, now outlawed in most of the Western world.

Instead, he is interested in advancing cloning to the point of making copies of human bone marrow, skin and organs for medical purposes. He also is interested in promoting public debate on the issue of human cloning.

He said there have been only a few responses to his advertisement, including one group involved in cloning vegetables.

Sayers has mixed a successful career importing giftware into Australia, through a business sold in the 1980s, with a long career in social activism.

Among other adventures, he visited North Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War (Australia was aligned with the U.S. for most of the war) and, when the issue of euthanasia suddenly came to the fore in Australia in 1996, he proposed building a suicide hospice in Sydney.

Sayers now spends a great deal of his time in Nicaragua, as one of a number of expatriate supporters of the Sandinista regime. He returns periodically to Sydney. *