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.
Hard to believe that some people are so narcissistic that they would go to these lengths to have a child instead of just adopting one of the hundreds of thousands of children already born and waiting for families.
Not arguing anything, just seeking opinion. It is a simple question, actually. If life begins at conception, and there is no conception, is it life? If this irritates you, I am sorry. But perhaps I am the canary in the coal mine. The question is not going to go away. There have to be many, many folks asking the same question, and the church is going to have to answer, eventually. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but it is not going away.
I believe in God with all my heart. Peace.
I pointed out how 2 fetus can grow from 1 “conception”. You skated around my evidence and the original question about twins.
I concede that twins are human, and two different and sacred souls. No problem there. God bless them.
But what about cloned people? No conception at all. What is your opinion as to their souls and is it possible to have a soul without conception? Not being a contrarian, just wondering, and don’t know what to think.
So I am just asking you and everyone, if there is no conception, is the person, well, human? Is there a soul? Yes or no?
From where comes the soul of the twin who splits off the child conceived through “conception”? You are hung up on a word. Does the soul also divide when the second embryo splits off?
Nailed it. It's not "what can I do," but "what should I do."
Is that a yes or no?
At the moment of creation, it becomes a unique being. That being can be subdivided but that becomes the creation of something new. The old still remains.
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