Infertility
researcher Panos Zavos
predicted yesterday that his Kentucky-based human cloning team will produce a
pregnancy this year, with the delivery of a cloned human being coming in 2003.
Only logistical problems, not scientific or medical ones,
now stand in the way of the team's attempts to clone a person, he said after
testifying before a congressional subcommittee debating whether any form of
cloning should be made illegal in this country.
Zavos said his nine-person
team, which includes physicians, physiologists and laboratory technicians, has
established two overseas sites where the cloning procedure will occur. He
wouldn't name the countries, although he said one is in Europe and the other is
in the region "between Greece and India."
He said that the laboratory and clinical facilities are
ready but that problems still exist in matters ranging from securing visas for
patients to ensuring they will have comfortable accommodations and good food.
"It's a matter of logistics now," he told
reporters in a hallway outside the hearing room where he had answered questions
from members of the House Government Reform subcommittee on criminal justice,
drug policy and human resources.
In the hearing, he said unequivocally more than once that
his team has not yet cloned and implanted a human embryo. He also said he
wouldn't clone a human being in the United States in any case, given the
popular opposition to the idea.
He did tell the panel, however, that the cloning
"genie is out of the bottle and it keeps getting bigger every day. There
is no way that this genie is going back into the bottle."
Formerly on the faculty of the University of Kentucky and
now an infertility treatment entrepreneur, Zavos said
his team is one of five in the world planning to clone human beings. He said he
knows of efforts underway in Russia and China, although he wouldn't say whether
he has had contact with the people involved in those efforts.
The other teams include one headed by Severino
Antinori, who directs a human reproduction research
center in Rome and until recently was a collaborator of Zavos,
and one affiliated with the Raelians, a small
religious sect with members in Canada and Britain.
Recent rumors and at least one newspaper report published
last month said three women are now carrying cloned fetuses created by Antinori. Zavos, however, said he
does not believe the reports, noting only that "I happen to have some
inside information." He promised that when his group achieves its first pregnancy,
"we will show you the evidence."
He said his group has screened and approved 12 couples
who want to have a child through cloning. In five of the couples, one or both
partners are physicians.
The couples come from several countries, and each has exhausted
other methods of reproducing, Zavos said. The
criteria for approval are the same as those he and his colleagues use for
candidates seeking in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
Recent success rates in the cloning of mice and cattle
have led the Kentucky team to believe that the likelihood of success in human
beings will approximate that of IVF, he said. That technique requires, on
average, the implantation of 12 to 14 embryos over numerous menstrual cycles to
get one gestation that is carried to term, Zavos
added.
The team includes people who are able to treat problem
pregnancies or malformed infants, and to terminate a pregnancy if necessary.
The decision whether to abort a fetus will be made by the couple involved, he
said.
He disputed the assertion, made by subcommittee chairman
Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.),
that "all clones so far have been found to suffer from severe
abnormalities, premature aging and early death."
"This is such an untrue statement," Zavos said. "I don't know why he doesn't put himself
under oath."
Zavos, 58, is a native of
Cyprus who immigrated to the United States in 1966. He has a doctorate in
physiology, not a medical degree. He did not offer objective evidence
supporting his assertions about the readiness of his team, but he said a
British documentary producer is accompanying him on his trips overseas and
recording the preparations on film.
Yesterday's House subcommittee hearing was unusual in
that the House has already passed a bill that would ban both cloning for the
purposes of reproduction and cloning to produce cells that could be used to
treat disease (therapeutic cloning). The Senate is considering two types of
cloning bills: ones that would ban all cloning, and
ones that would ban reproductive cloning only. Senate aides said it appeared
the hearing was called to try to increase support for a ban on all forms of
cloning.
May 16, 2002