By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
One of the world’s most controversial fertility doctors claims he cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women while having the entire procedure recorded on film by an independent documentary film-maker.
Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, a naturalized American citizen, says he conducted the work in a secret laboratory located somewhere in the Middle East where there is no ban on cloning. Zavos, who has clinics in Kentucky and his native Cyprus, claims the recipients of the cloned embryos were from Britain, the U.S. and an unspecified country in the Middle East.
While none of the embryo transfers resulted in a viable pregnancy, Dr. Zavos told London’s Independent that this was just the “first chapter” in his ongoing and serious attempts at producing a baby cloned from the skin cells of its “parent.”
“There is absolutely no doubt about it, and I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” Dr Zavos said.
“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. We’re not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one,” he said.
In 2004, Dr Zavos claimed to have transferred a cloned human embryo into a woman’s womb but failed to produce hard evidence. This time, he recorded the procedure with the help of an independent documentary film-maker who is vouching for him.
In spite of weakening restrictions on this kind of research, transferring a cloned embryo into a human womb is still considered “taboo” in most countries where it is regarded as a criminal offense.
Dr. Zavos claims he has been approached by “scores” of couples over the past few years for help in overcoming their infertility by using the same cloning technique that were used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996. These desperate couples are willing to pay anywhere from $45,000 to $75,000 for his help.
“I get inquiries every day. To date we have had over 100 inquiries and every inquiry is serious. The criteria is that they have to consider human reproductive cloning as the only option available to them after they have exhausted everything else,” Dr Zavos said.
“We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don’t participate in this.”
The grieving have also approached Dr. Zavos for help in cloning their loved ones and thereby “bringing them back” to life. He claims to have produced cloned embryos from three dead people thus far, including a 10-year-old child called Cady, who died in a car crash.
Dr Zavos fused cells taken from these corpses not with human eggs but with eggs taken from cows that had their own genetic material removed. He did this to create a human-animal hybrid “model” that would allow him to study the cloning procedure.
Cells from these “embryos” could one day be extracted from the frozen hybrid embryo and fused with an empty human egg with its nucleus removed. This double cloning process could produce a human embryo that Dr Zavos said could be transferred into the womb to produce a clone of the dead person.
“In the future, when we get serious about executing things correctly, this thing will be very easy to do,” he said. “If we find out that this technique does not work, I don’t intend to step on dead bodies to achieve something because I don’t have that kind of ambition. My ambition is to help people.”
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