Outrage at bid for first human clone

The US-based fertility expert, Panos Zavos, stunned an audience in London when he revealed he had taken an egg from a 35-year-old woman, inserted her husband’s genetic material, and placed the embryo in her womb. If the highly-controversial pregnancy attempt is successful, it will result in the birth of a child genetically identical to its father but with no genes from its mother.

The attempt to create the world’s first cloned human being was condemned last night by fertility experts, politicians and medical ethicists who warned the cloned child could suffer serious medical consequences and that the technology could be abused.

There was also widespread scepticism about whether Zavos had achieved his aim.

Dropping what appeared to be a carefully planned bombshell, Zavos told a press conference in London that the implantation, which would be illegal in the UK, was carried out two weeks ago.

He said he was now waiting to see if the procedure led to a full pregnancy, but that there was a 60-70% chance that would not happen.

"I do not have a pregnancy to announce. Stand by two or three weeks when we will know more," he cautioned.

But Zavos, who runs a fertility clinic in Kentucky, said if the current attempt failed his team would simply try again until it did produce a foetus. "We are going to do another one and another one and another until we succeed," he said.

The announcement follows a claim by a religious sect last year that it had produced the world’s first cloned baby. That claim, by the Raelian movement, also met with scepticism from scientists and has not been backed since by essential DNA proof.

Zavos has also not produced any incontrovertible evidence, but it is thought he may well have the technical ability required.

The cloning technique he described is similar to the technology that created Scotland’s Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal.

He said he had taken skin cells from the woman’s husband, then produced another type of cell from them, called a fibroblast, which he fused with an egg from the woman. It is understood the egg had already had its own genetic material removed, so the resulting embryo is therefore genetically identical to the father.

The father cannot produce sperm, Zavos said, hence the need for the couple to receive fertility treatment.

Health Secretary John Reid immediately condemned the move as a "gross misuse of genetic science".

Britain has outlawed reproductive cloning and a 10-year prison sentence can be imposed on anyone who implants an embryo in a woman which does not result from egg-sperm fertilisation.

Apart from ethical concerns, there is growing evidence from experiments with animals that current cloning techniques carry a high risk of miscarriage, stillbirth and abnormalities.

The process is also illegal in a number of other countries but there is no worldwide ban.

"The Government has already acted to stop this happening here," Reid said.

"We are one of the few countries in the world who have passed legislation to ban this possibility. There will be no cloned babies in the UK while I am Secretary of State for Health.

"This government shares the widespread public repugnance that human cloning could be attempted.

"We made a manifesto commitment to prevent this happening in the UK and we acted swiftly to deliver this commitment by passing the Human Reproductive Cloning Act at the end of 2001.

"This explicitly bans any attempt to create a cloned human baby in the UK. We are also working to achieve a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning through the United Nations."

Zavos refused to give details of the woman’s origin or the date of the implantation, but confirmed the process did not take place in the UK, US or Europe. He also failed to provide any empirical evidence of the procedure.

However, he claimed his team was "advanced enough" to minimise risk. "They feel quite confident they can execute such an effort," he said.

He also called on world governments to get involved in the cloning process by producing guidelines under which it could be carried out by responsible practitioners.

"They had better start developing guidelines because it’s too late to ban it, it’s too late to outlaw it," he said.

Professor Ian Wilmut, whose team produced Dolly at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, said: "If anybody is doing this it’s astonishingly irresponsible, because the evidence from all the species in which cloning has been studied at all thoroughly is that there is a high incidence of late abortions, and a much higher incidence of dead offspring, and of offspring that are alive but abnormal."

Wilmut also said he would have ethical concerns even if the procedure could be made safe, because of the perception that any cloned child was effectively the same person as its genetically identical parent.

"If it was known to be a genetically identical twin we wouldn’t be able to help ourselves thinking in some senses that this is the same person. I don’t think that sort of pressures [on a child] should exist," he said.

Zavos was also condemned by the pressure group Life as exploiting the woman’s desperation for children.

Spokesman Patrick Cusworth said: "If what he says turns out to be true, I would say that he has exposed this 35-year-old woman’s vulnerability to almost incredible risk.

"We feel that Dr Zavos has exposed this woman to near suicidal risk for his own financial and egotistical motives."

Sheila McLean, professor of medical law and ethics at Glasgow University and government adviser on medical ethics said: "We have to treat this sort of claim with a certain amount of scepticism. But assuming that he has done it, at the moment the science just doesn’t seem to be there to make attempts at cloning anything other than pretty irresponsible because of the real prospect that any child born would suffer from medical problems."

Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Mike Rumbles, said: "It is morally repugnant that anyone would attempt to clone a human being. It is one thing to attempt to clone animals, but this is beyond the pale. We are meddling with human life and are on the edge of a huge moral abyss."

Mike Weir, the SNP’s health spokesman in the Commons, described it as "an appalling misuse of medical science".

A Scottish Tory spokesman described Zavos’ work as "irresponsible".

Before announcing the implantation, Zavos had used the press conference to promote embryo splitting, the creation of two identical IVF twins of which one would be used as a source of spare body parts for the other. He said splitting could either be used to reproduce two embryos, or one could be kept back and frozen as an "insurance policy" for the other embryo.

By keeping the second embryo frozen, it would provide an abundant supply of stem cells should the child ever grow ill.

Peter Braude, fertility expert at King’s College Hospital, said: "The idea of splitting embryos is not new. It was done in animals 15 years ago. But it has always been accompanied by low success rates and has therefore never been accepted for us in humans. Zavos does not represent mainstream science and what he and his colleagues are doing is seeking publicity rather than advancing science."

WHAT IS HUMAN CLONING?

CLONING is the process of making a genetically identical organism without the normal method, which involves fertilisation of an egg by sperm.

Practically, cloning means the creation of cells or even whole plants or animals using DNA from a single "parent" - bypassing the normal reproductive process.

Clones do occur naturally, such as in identical human twins, in which case, although they are genetically different from their parents, they are naturally occurring clones of each other.

The advent of human cloning has aroused worldwide interest and concern because of its scientific and ethical implications.

Critics say it is "playing God", while scientists caution that most mammal clones do not even make it to birth or are born with abnormalities.

Others say cloning is an inevitable result of advances in science and technology.

Animal cloning has been the subject of scientific experiments for years, but received little attention until the birth of the first cloned mammal in 1997.

The much-celebrated Dolly the sheep (above) was created by scientists at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh.

Since Dolly, several scientists have cloned other animals, including cows, mice and pigs.

A project was even launched to clone a prehistoric woolly mammoth in Japan.

Scientists knew the technology used to produce Dolly could also be used to clone a human.

But the recent success in cloning animals has sparked fierce debates about the use and morality of cloning plants, animals and possibly humans.

Cloning is an umbrella term used by scientists to describe a number of different processes for duplicating biological material.