Doctor says he has implanted cloned human embryo

By JEREMY LAURANCE

One of the showmen of the fertility business yesterday claimed to have breached another reproductive frontier by transferring the first cloned human embryo into a 35-year-old woman.


Panos Zavos, a fertility specialist at the University of Kentucky, gave no details of the patient, or where she was treated, other than to say it was not in the US, the UK or "the continent of Europe."


There was no independent verification of his claim and he admitted there was only a 30 per cent chance that the embryo, grown from skin cells from the woman's husband, would implant in her womb. A pregnancy test would be carried out within the next week, he said.


Although he had not been present at the transfer, a documentary TV crew had filmed the procedure.


His claim came at the end of a packed press conference called to discuss another cloning topic and was received with a mixture of astonishment, scepticism and outrage by journalists and experts.


At one point Dr Zavos, who was accompanied on the platform by a grim faced British IVF specialist, Paul Rainsbury, displayed a mocked up picture of himself in a space suit standing on the surface of the moon - a scientist reaching out to embrace new worlds.


"If George W Bush wants to put a station on the moon to explore Mars, what is wrong with us searching for our reproductive future in the stars," he said, to laughter.


Although he is not the first to claim to have cloned a human embryo - the Raelian cult said a year ago they had cloned several babies whose whereabouts and identities have never been revealed - his assertions have to be taken seriously because he has the technical expertise to achieve his ends.


He claimed to have created the first cloned human embryo earlier last year but plans to transfer it into a woman had to be postponed in July when the woman developed "complications." That clone remains frozen, he said yesterday, and a fresh cloned embryo was used in the new attempt.


His appearance in London was widely condemned yesterday as publicity seeking and raising false hope in infertile couples.


Health secretary John Reid described it as a "gross misuse of genetic science."


Lord May, president of the Royal Society, said: "Attempts to use untested technologies which exploit vulnerable people who desperately want children should be condemned."


Wolff Reik, cloning expert at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, said even if the woman became pregnant the odds were stacked against the baby.


"It could die at any time. In every single experiment, 99 per cent of clones die in the womb and the remaining 1 per cent have problems. It remains irresponsible to do it in a human."


The process of creating the cloned embryo was similar to that used to clone Dolly the Sheep but with "some modifications," Dr Zavos said.

Even that claim met with scepticism yesterday.


Scientists said the technique described of transferring the whole contents of the skin cell, including the nucleus and surrounding cytoplasm containing the mitochondria, into the egg from the mother had never been reported in a peer-reviewed medical journal.


Cloning is normally achieved by transfer of the cell nucleus alone.


Dr Zavos saved his shock announcement until the end of the press conference at which he declared he was launching an embryo splitting programme - to offer couples the chance of taking half of the embryo and implanting it into the mother's womb while the other half is frozen and stored, either as a back up should the first one fail or as an "insurance policy" to provide stem cells in the event of the baby falling ill.


Embryo splitting has not yet been successfully carried out in primates, the animals most closely related to humans.


The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said it would not be legal to take embryos created in the UK abroad for treatment without permission and that would not be granted for a procedure disallowed in the UK.


However, British couples could travel to the US for treatment by Dr Zavos, as they have done in the past, referred by Mr Rainsbury, medical director of the Rainsbury Clinic.


Mr Rainsbury said yesterday that he supported Dr Zavosí's work on embryo splitting. Between 10 and 15 per cent of women seeking fertility treatment were aged over 40 and produced a small number of embryos. "It is good to have a back up," he said.




History of cloning




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