Posted on 04/22/2009 10:25:11 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A United States-based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women.
In an interview published on Wednesday, Panayiotis Zavos told Britain’s Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “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’s work is widely condemned by mainstream fertility experts, who question whether the technique, which also raises complex ethical questions, is safe. Although other scientists have created human cloned embryos in test tubes to extract stem cells for research, Zavos has broken a taboo by actually putting them inside women’s wombs.
He said he has also produced cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old girl called Cady who died in a car crash in the US. The child's blood cells were frozen and sent to Zavos.
The doctor, a naturalised US citizen born in Cyprus, is thought to have carried out the procedures in a secret laboratory somewhere in the Middle East to escape the US ban on cloning.
The procedures were recorded by a documentary maker and will be shown on the Discovery Channel in UK later on Wednesday.
Zavos said that his goal is to help infertile couples who can't have babies naturally, so that at least one of the parents can be reproduced as a twin of themselves through cloning. “I get enquiries every day. To date, we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry is serious”, he told the Independent. In 2004, Zavos claimed that he had implanted the first human cloned embryo into a woman’s uterus although the scientific community expressed scepticism over a lack of proof about his findings.
Last month, we had the spectacle of Italian fertility expert Severino Antinori’s assertion that three clones already exist: two boys and a girl. He told Italy’s Oggi magazine that the children are now nine years old and living in eastern Europe. However, he failed to back his assertions with proof.
I think some things should not be tampered with, even if theoretically possible.
The methods employed, while on a micro-cellular level, are very crude, not to far removed from Mengele’s methods.
So, he's only been around for 100 days?
cool, as long as we can build an army to kill enemies like a mix of Star Wars and Universal Soldier
Oh, gee. Another Doctor who thinks he is God. Why am I not surprised.
I agree.
Wonder what the church folks think about the dude’s soul?
Does he/she have one?
If life begins at conception, between a sperm and egg, and this did not happen, is it life?
50,000 cloned Obamas on the way?
Kahnnnnnnnnnnn
(And why bother protesting abortion when designer children are so much...better...than natural ones anyway?)
I feel a vanity coming on about this...
NO cheers, unfortunately.
Why not put 9 of them into the womb of one woman? Then Octomom would be put to shame, someone would outdo her, 9 babies, and they are clones!
“What people fail to realize is that this leads the way to designer humans cloned for spare parts.”
Of course you will clone the parts you need, less chance on biological rejection.
Are you arguing that not all twins have a soul? Or are you just making an atheist argument against souls altogether?
Monozygotic twins, frequently referred to as identical twins, occur when a single egg is fertilized to form one zygote (monozygotic) which then divides into two separate embryos. The division of the developing zygote into 2 embryos occurs within 8 days of fertilization 99% of the time.
How about the things they are doing in Europe, like working with human-animal hybrids so they can claim that their scientific experiments are “ethical” (non-human subjects).
Create deliberate SUB-humans (part human but not deserving of rights).
Sick culture.
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