'I can clone a human being' - fertility doctor

A controversial fertility doctor says he transferred cloned embryos into the wombs of four women. Photo / Image from Wikimedia Commons by Bob Walker

A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Panayiotis Zavos has broken the ultimate taboo of transferring cloned embryos into the human womb, a procedure that is a criminal offence in Britain and illegal in many other countries.

He carried out the work at a secret laboratory, probably located in the Middle East where there is no cloning ban.

Dr Zavos, a naturalised American, also has fertility clinics in Kentucky and Cyprus, where he was born.

His patients - three married couples and a single woman - came from Britain, the United States and an unspecified country in the Middle East.

None of the embryo transfers led to a viable pregnancy but Dr Zavos said yesterday 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 in an interview yesterday with The Independent.

"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.

His claims are certain to be denounced by mainstream fertility scientists who in 2004 tried to gag Dr Zavos by imploring the British media not to give him the oxygen of publicity without him providing evidence to back up his statements.

Despite a lower profile over the past five years, scores of couples have now approached Dr Zavos hoping that he will help them to overcome their infertility by using the same cloning technique that was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.

"I get enquiries every day. To date we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry 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."

It took 277 attempts to create Dolly but since then the cloning procedure in animals has been refined and it has now become more efficient, although most experts in the field believe that it is still too dangerous to be allowed as a form of human fertility treatment.

Dr Zavos dismissed these fears saying that many of the problems related to animal cloning - such as congenital defects and oversized offspring - have been minimised.

"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."

Dr Zavos also revealed that he has produced cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old child called Cady, who died in a car crash.

He did so after being asked by grieving relatives if he could create biological clones of their loved ones.

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.

Dr Zavos emphasised that it was never his intention to transfer any of these hybrid embryos into the wombs of women, despite Cady's mother saying she would sanction this if there was any hope of her child's clone being born.

"I would not transfer those embryos. We never did this in order to transfer those embryos," Dr Zavos said.

"The hybrid model is the thing that saved us. It's a model for us to learn. First you develop a model and then you go on to the target. We did not want to experiment on human embryos, which is why we developed the hybrid model."

Dr Zavos is collaborating with Karl Illmensee, who has a long track record in cloning experiments dating back to pioneering studies in the early 1980s. They are about to recruit 10 younger couples in need of fertility treatment for the next chapter in his attempts at producing cloned babies.

"I think we know why we did not have a pregnancy," said Dr Zavos.

"I think that the circumstances were not as ideal as we'd like them to be. We've done the four couples so far under the kind of limitations that we were working under."

"We think we know why those four transfer didn't take. I think with better subjects - and there are hundreds people out there who want to do this - if we choose 10 couples, I think we will get some to carry a pregnancy."

All the cloning attempts, which date back to 2003, were filmed by Peter Williams, a distinguished documentary maker, for the Discovery Channel, which will show the programme tonight in the UK.

Mr Williams said that he was present at the secret laboratory when the cloning was carried out by Dr Illmensee.

"There's never been any question of concealment, because we'd have known about it," Mr Williams said.

- INDEPENDENT