BIOTECHNOLOGY ISSUES: US scientist expects to clone human embryo within one month - UPDATE

by Rachel Rivera

October 03, 2002

NEW YORK (AFX-GEM) - US scientist Panos Zavos, one of the leading figures in the race to clone humans, said Thursday he expects to clone an embryo and implant it in a woman within the next month.
"You will be seeing pictures of our cloned human embryos soon. Give us a month," Zavos told AFX Global Ethics Monitor in a telephone interview from his Lexington, Kentucky office.

"Things are moving quite well. I've got seven to eight couples ready to go now. We hope to have a pregnancy before the year is over, and 2003 hopefully will be the birth of a cloned human baby," he said.

Zavos, an infertility specialist and CEO of Zavos Diagnostics Laboratories, which sells infertility treatment products, said he had just returned from a visit to his laboratory overseas where his cloning experiments are taking place. He would not disclose the location.

There are no existing laws in the US that specifically prohibit reproductive human cloning.
But scientists opposed to cloning of any species contend the technology carries serious risks for the cloned offspring.

The technique has had a high failure rate in animals and resulted in congenital malformations, physical deformities, immune system deficiencies and premature aging in aborted fetuses and live births.
Among the small number of cloned animals that live more than a few days, many suffer defects or disease including pneumonia, liver deficiency, obesity and premature aging, opponents say.

The United Nations has initiated groundwork for an international treaty to adopt a global ban on reproductive human cloning, but its 191 member states have yet to agree on the extent of the ban.

The president of US-based human cloning firm Clonaid, which is linked to a UFO cult, said Wednesday that it had implanted cloned embryos in several host mothers and that viable pregnancies were in progress.

Zavos dismissed Clonaid's claims as "a farce" to promote their Geneva-based cult, known as the Raellians. Raellians believe extraterrestrials populated the earth with clones of their race and that it is incumbent upon humans to continue the tradition of cloning.

Zavos also discounted previous announcements by Italian researcher Severino Antinori that he had implanted cloned human embryos that ended in miscarriages.

He said unlike the other researchers, ZDL would provide proof of its results.

According to Zavos, cloning is the only choice for infertile couples when artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization fail to produce results.

"Our mission is to help infertile couples have biological offspring of their own," he said.

The cloning procedure involves removing the nucleus from an egg, either from the mother or from an egg donor, implanting DNA from either parent in its place, and transferring the resulting embryos into the womb of the mother or a surrogate mother.

"If I take the father's DNA, the baby is a copy of him. If I take the mother's DNA it's her copy. We tailor the treatment for each couple separately depending on their different needs," said Zavos.
Groups opposed to the reproductive cloning of humans say the technology objectifies human life and threatens to undermine civil human society.

"The technology allows for creating multiple copies of people or destroying them like artifacts," said Richard Hayes, executive director for the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, California.
Hayes said his group is pushing for legislation that would ban reproductive cloning but is not opposed to strictly regulated stem-cell research, which uses cloned embryos for medical treatment purposes. The embryos must be destroyed in order to extract the cells needed for research.

The US has banned federal funding for all human cloning research, but there are no restrictions on private financing for this research.

"Regulating only federally-funded research is, in effect, allowing anything to be done in the private sector," said Peter Shorett a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CRG favors a ban that would prohibit all forms of human cloning, including cloning for medical research purposes.

"Cloning is biologically disruptive and involves inhumane treatment of animals," said CRG board
member Stuart Newman, a biology professor at New York Medical College.

"Experimentally manipulating human embryos to create genetically engineered humans brings up serious ethical concerns. This could lead to people's attempts to design their offspring or to make biological improvements in their children. We find this extremely objectionable," said Newman.

Zavos defends the technology as one that holds promise for relieving the agony of infertile couples.

"There is no ethical problem here. And there is no law against this. We have people who are really suffering because of infertility. There is a human issue here," he said.

Responding to widespread concerns about the potential abuse of the technology to create so-called designer babies, Zavos said: "Those are things for the future to handle."


rachel.rivera@afxnews.com