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The race to be first: The struggles behind Zavos’ claim of clone embryo implant

By Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor

“BEING First” is the motto of American fertility expert Dr Panos Zavos. On the Kentucky doctor’s personal website, the heading “Being first is what it’s all about!” flashes up alongside photographs of him giving interviews on prime- time TV. Underneath is a list of his achievements adorned with red rosettes.

They include taking part in the creation of the first IVF baby in Kentucky and participating in the development of new IVF techniques. The most impressive to date is the claim to have created the first human cloned embryo for reproductive purposes.

The pioneers: Two men who defied scientific community to blaze a trail

But now the publicity-seeking fertility pioneer has a remarkable, and to many shocking, new feat to boast of.

Yesterday afternoon at a press conference broadcast live on Sky TV, Zavos proudly announced that he had implanted a cloned embryo in a 35-year-old woman. If the embryo is carried to term, the first human clone will be born.

It was the moment Zavos has long dreamed of. Sharing a platform with a reputable British consultant gynaecologist, with the world’s media and representation from UK’s regulatory authorities in the audience, Zavos boldly announced he had performed the ultimate fertility treatment. He has taken the final step in creating an exact replica of a human being.

The world was alerted to Zavos’s controversial bid in March 2001 when, with former collaborator, Italian gynaecologist Severino Antinori, he told a conference in Rome: “The genie is out of the bottle. Dolly is here, and we are next.”

The ethical debate: ‘Zavos is grossly irresponsible’

Months later, at a major scientific conference in Washington, attended by the world’s most eminent scientists, Zavos and Antinori faced their fellow professionals and explained their plans.

They were accused of trying to create babies with such severe abnormalities that they would die shortly after birth.

But the maverick scientists immediately compared themselves to their heroes – British in vitro fertilisation pioneers Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe who produced the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978.

Back in 1971, at another Washington meeting, Edwards and Steptoe came under similar criticism when they described their plans to create IVF babies, a technique that is now routine and has led to the birth of hundreds of thousands of healthy children.

And Zavos’s cloning efforts were given a boost when Edwards suggested that cloning could one day be as acceptable as IVF.

The science: Pitfalls and possibilities

He drew parallels between the vilification heaped on Zavos and Antinori and the criticism he faced while working on the IVF breakthrough.

Comparing the two scientific meetings in Washington, 30 years apart, Edwards said: “What happened in response to the first Washington meeting? Exactly the opposite of everything the critics propounded. IVF exploded worldwide and abnormalities were the same – or less – than with natural conception. So where have all those endless critics gone?

“Will the same happen with cloning? It is unlike IVF in its accompanying embryological disasters in animals, and nobody would wish such horrific defects to be transferred to humans. But this could be a temporary problem. Then the true ethics of cloning will emerge, free from arguments about malformations. Will there be any real harm in helping the occasional infertile couple to have their own child, while controlling the excesses of cloning?”

The apparent backing of Edwards was important to Zavos, who has tremendous respect for the UK, which has led the way not only in infertility breakthroughs but also with the creation of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, in 1997.

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