Dripping grease fuels the flames that jump above a wide metal grill as

nudges hotdogs and flips burgers. The office cookout, behind the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton, is unseasonably cold and cloudy.

You wouldn't know it to look at him, but the Portland biologist, has stirred up an

around gene research, cloning and stem cells. The day before, he was on the phone with reporters around the world, defending his techniques to harvest human embryonic stem cells for use in future treatment of Parkinson's disease and other conditions.

The methods he detailed in a prestigious journal in May are viewed as within

of creating human clones. Indeed, his latest research at Oregon Health & Science University is banned from any federal funding because it entails destruction of what are considered early human embryos.

His study renewed calls in the U.S. for a cloning ban similar to other countries. Making matters worse, duplicate images in his published article led a posse of scientists online to pore through his earlier work, searching for other errors.

looks unfazed, cheerfully chatting as he minds the grill. The day before, even as the furor over his study peaked, he took his assistants to Costco to shop for the cookout to honor his departing assistant, Masahito Tachibana.

It's not that Mitalipov doesn't care about the criticism, his colleagues say. It's that he's supremely confident his work is accurate. So he ensured the controversy wouldn't kill the cookout for Tachibana, who's returning to Japan. He also reassured Tachibana, responsible for the duplicated images, their work would be proven correct.

"Eventually people will know," Mitalipov says.

Blues and genes

A fan of old Chicago blues, Mitalipov grew up wanting to move to the U.S. so he could hear the music played live.

He was born in 1961 in Almaty, a city the size of Portland in Kazakhstan. Back then it was the Soviet Union, and in 1979 Mitalipov started his required two-year stint in the military, an army radio tech assigned to a mobile rocket unit in northwestern Russia.

But his parents, both teachers, had emphasized education to him and his three younger siblings. So after the army he studied reproductive biology and genetics in college, inspired by in vitro fertilization advancements. On the side he played guitar in a Russian rock cover band at parties and weddings.

One day in 1989 his university mentor showed him new research on something called stem cells, tissue in embryos that could be become anything: heart or liver cells, even blood. This discovery was going to be big, the professor said.

Mitalipov shifted to stem cells, but Soviet research funding was drying up. He could switch careers or leave the country. In 1995 he got a visa and found a job studying cow stem cells at Utah State University.

In Utah, while visiting a friend, he met Gulinur Nassyrova. Like him, she is from Almaty and is Uyghur, a mix of Caucasian and East Asian genetically related to people in Turkey, Mongolia, and Native Americans.

They hit it off. But her vacation was soon ending, and she had to return to Almaty. Mitalipov popped the question just two weeks after meeting her and they married in Las Vegas.

Today, they live in Beaverton with their daughter, Nargiz 14, and their son, Paul, 11. Like their dad, they play guitar. All are Americans -- Mitalipov won his citizenship in 1999.

On the wall of the family's living room are watercolors of scenes from Kazakhstan. They return every summer and while the kids say it's beautiful, they wouldn't want to live there. "It's more of a city," Nargiz says.

Mitalipov likes new adventures. Though not much of a fisherman, he took the family out on a charter boat in Mexico last year and bagged a seven-foot marlin. A couple of years before, after seeing a TV ad for recreational vehicles, he surprised his kids with a RV camping trip around Oregon.

That's classic Mitalipov, laughs his boss, Richard Stouffer: "He'll try anything."

Stouffer is a division director at OHSU's primate center, and helped hire Mitalipov from Utah in 1998, attracted by his skills with high-powered microscopes and delicate instruments to move the nucleus of one cell into another.

Stouffer says Mitalipov's characteristic boldness helped him succeed in science where others had given up. "You talk about breaking the paradigm. He's certainly done that."

Link to cloning

Mitalipov stands in a smallish room lined with microscopes and two electronic cell manipulator stations, each with joysticks. Each machine has a thermometer hooked to it, ensuring it's 98.6 degrees. The whole room is warm, the lights dim. Four large incubators hold cell cultures in low-oxygen environment.

The setup is the secret. "That's the way we keep them happy," he says. Otherwise, "they don't like it."

Mitalipov laid the groundwork at the primate center. One of his breakthroughs, cloning stem cells from a monkey named Semos (the god in the movie Planet of Apes) made Time magazine's top 10 scientific discoveries in 2007.

In addition to the primate center, one of only eight in the country, OHSU has another advantage. Unlike many universities, OHSU lets researchers pay women $5,000 per donated egg.

Still another edge is Mitalipov himself.

"He has this incredible vision and a belief that he can make things happen that seem impossible," says Rebecca Tippner-Hedges, a stem cell biologist in his lab.

The stem cells that Mitalipov creates are microscopic and invisible. They don't even have names, instead coded to prevent study bias or investigation by animal rights activists, Mitalipov says.

He does his human stem cell work in the OHSU Center for Health and Healing on the South Waterfront. To avoid federal stem cell rules, OHSU set up a privately funded, almost identical lab.

In both labs, the cell manipulation machines use computer-aided imaging to allow manipulation of things the width of a micron -- one-millionth of a meter.

Mitalipov uses them to strip the nucleus from an egg and replace it with DNA from a skin cell. His team activates the cell using chemicals, electricity and caffeine -- one of Mitalipov's special twists.

The result is what biologists call an early embryo, formed using cloning techniques, although unfertilized.

Then stem cells are extracted from the embryo and grown into bunches scrunched together like the core of a pomegranate. Thousands of stem cells are stored in a translucent plastic vial the size of a short, fat cigarette, then frozen in liquid nitrogen.

The stem cells produced are an identical match to the skin cell donor, making them ideal for transplants and personalized therapies. Some scientists disagree, but Mitalipov says his are higher quality stem cells than a competing technology that does not destroy embryos.

Cloning human embryos as Mitalipov has done was previously thought impossible. He says the ones produced are unlikely to survive in the uterus. They've tried with monkeys, and it doesn't work.

So what does it all mean?

Paul Knoepfler, a University of California stem cell scientist, says on

that cloned babies could now be a reality in five years, though it will probably take longer.

Though Mitalipov and OHSU try to downplay the link between his work and cloning, Knoepfler says it's real: "Some crazy person will try to clone humans."

Stouffer, Mitalipov's boss, agrees with the majority of scientists that human cloning is taboo. But that's society's decision, and in the U.S., no federal law or rules exist to prevent it, unlike in countries like the United Kingdom, he says.

Mitalipov stresses his work is for curing diseases. But whether it involves cloning techniques or not, Mitalipov doesn't agree that it's up to society or lawmakers to decide what's right. Nor should it be up to scientists.

He hasn't figured out his own take on human cloning, but medical need should trump all. "I don't think it's appropriate for healthy people to decide for patients," he says.

-- Nick Budnick