CONTROVERSIAL Cypriot-born doctor Panayiotis Zavos cloned 14 human embryos and implanted 11 in the wombs of four women in what ultimately resulted in a failed attempt to produce the world’s first cloned baby, it was revealed yesterday.
Although none of the implantations led to a viable pregnancy, Zavos said it was only a matter of time before a cloned baby was born.
“There is absolutely no way that it will not happen. 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 told The Independent newspaper in an interview.
It is thought Zavos, who originally hails from occupied Trikomo, carried out his work at a secret laboratory in the Middle East. Human cloning is illegal in most countries, including Cyprus.
The news broke ahead the broadcast of last night’s Discovery Channel programme ‘Human Cloning’. Documentary maker Peter Williams was given “unrestricted access” to Zavos’ work from 2003 as he attempted to clone a human being for the first time.
Williams – who thirty years ago made a film about the world’s first test-tube baby Louise Brown – told Sky News Online that Zavos “saw vigorous growth in 30 cell embryos before he transferred them into the womb and that is why he is optimistic that a human clone baby will be born within two years”.
The documentary maker added: “This has reached an advanced stage and is potentially a viable form of infertility treatment.”
According to Zavos this is the first chapter in his ongoing attempts to produce a baby cloned from the skin cells of its parent.
In the documentary the doctor, who has fertility clinics in America and Cyprus, claims to have created cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old girl called Cady who died in a car crash in the US. The grieving families are said to have approached him and allowed him to take cells from their bodies.
Zavos then used the cells to create human-animal hybrid models by fusing them with cows’ eggs so as to allow him to study the cloning procedure. None of these embryos were transferred to women.
Zavos told The Independent that his ultimate goal was to help infertile couples who cannot have babies naturally, so that at least one of the parents can be reproduced as a twin of themselves through cloning.
He is hoping to achieve this by using a similar technique to the one that was used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Dolly was cloned after 277 attempts.
“I get enquiries every day. To date, we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry is serious,” Zavos told the British daily.
Most experts believe human cloning is still too dangerous to be used as a form of human fertility treatment. It is also widely criticised as unethical.
This was the ‘first chapter’ in his ongoing attempts to produce a baby cloned from the skin cells of its parent, Zavos said.
“We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world,” he said.
“The rich and the famous don’t participate in this… My ambition is to help people.”
The four transfers reported in last night’s documentary involved three married couples and a single woman. The patients came from Britain, the United States and an unspecified country in the Middle East. The four women volunteers were apparently not “ideal subjects” and so they all failed to become pregnant.
Zavos said: “I think we know why we did not have a pregnancy. I think with better subjects, and there are hundreds of people out there who want to do this – if we chose 10 couples, I think we will get some to carry a pregnancy.”
This is not the first time Zavos has made such claims.
In 2004 the scientist said he had transferred a cloned embryo to a 35-year-old woman, so she could give birth to a clone of her husband. A month later it emerged the attempt had failed and the woman had not become pregnant. Many scientists dismissed him as a charlatan at the time.
His name re-appeared two years later when he told the Guardian he had implanted cloned embryos into five women, including one 52-year-old Briton.
This time Williams claims his independent film crew has filmed “evidence” to back Zavos’ assertions.
Wiliams said: “There’s never been any question of concealment, because we’d have known about it.”
