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"Evidence" of attempt to clone baby

David Adam

London: A maverick fertility expert has published evidence of an attempt to produce the world's first cloned human baby. Panos Zavos, a reproductive scientist, caused a storm in 2004 when he told a press conference in London he had cloned a human embryo from the skin cells of an infertile man and transferred it to the uterus of the man's wife.

Dr. Zavos later said the transfer had failed and the woman did not become pregnant — but many scientists doubted whether he had performed the experiment. Most fertility experts say such a move to clone a baby would be unethical and dangerous for mother and child.

Details have now appeared in this month's Archives of Andrology, effectively placing the experiments on the scientific record. Dr. Zavos and his colleague Karl Illmensee describe how they copied the technique used by U.K. scientists to make Dolly the sheep — somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). They say they took DNA from the man's skin cells and fused it inside three eggs taken from the woman which were given a burst of electricity to encourage them to develop as embryos.

After three days one of the embryos had reached the four-cell stage and ``was subsequently transferred into the patient's uterus.'' Two weeks later blood tests showed the woman was not pregnant.

The paper says: ``This is the first evidence of the creation and transfer of a cloned human embryo for reproductive purposes. Even though no pregnancy was established, human reproduction via SCNT may be possible ... in the future.''

Richard Gardner, chairman of the Royal Society's working group on stem cell research, said: ``We wanted Zavos to publish his findings and now he has, but a four-cell embryo is very early stage and doesn't tell you anything about whether it would be able to develop further.''

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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