Fertility doctor on brink of cloning human:
report
LONDON (AFP) - - A US-based fertility doctor claimed to
have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the
wombs of four women in an interview published on Wednesday.
Panayiotis Zavos told Britain's Independent newspaper that
although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result,
the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of
years.
"There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is
coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen," he
said, quoted by the paper.
"If we intensify our efforts, we can have a cloned baby within a
year or two, but I don't know whether we can intensify our efforts
to that extent."
Zavos's work is widely condemned by mainstream fertility
experts, who question whether the technique, which also raises
complex ethical questions, is safe.
Although other scientists have created human cloned embryos in
test tubes to extract stem cells for research, Zavos has broken a
taboo by actually putting them inside women's wombs.
He said he has also produced cloned embryos of three dead
people, including a 10-year-old girl called Cady who died in a car
crash in the US. The child's blood cells were frozen and sent to
Zavos.
The doctor, a naturalised US citizen born in Cyprus, is thought
to have carried out the procedures in a secret laboratory somewhere
in the Middle East to escape the US ban on cloning.
He uses the same technique as was used to clone Dolly the sheep,
the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
The procedures were recorded by a documentary maker and will be
shown on the Discovery Channel in Britain later Wednesday.
In 2004, Zavos claimed to have implanted the first human cloned
embryo into a woman's uterus although scientists then expressed
scepticism over a lack of proof about his findings.
--AFP