In a move criticised by the UK's Royal Society as 'yet another publicity stunt', Dr Panos Zavos, the controversial fertility doctor who last month announced that he had transferred a cloned human embryo into a 35-year old woman, has now announced that the procedure did not work. Last week, Zavos told a UK newspaper that the woman had not become pregnant.
Zavos first announced in September 2003 that he had a cloned human embryo in frozen storage, but has never produced any evidence to prove his claims. At a press conference in London last month, he told journalists that the frozen cloned embryo was still in storage, while a fresh cloned embryo had been used to treat the woman. Clinicians and scientists dismissed the announcement as a publicity stunt and condemned Zavos for attempting human cloning when the scientific community believed the procedure was unsafe. Experiments in animals have shown that procedures used to clone mammals have an extremely low success rate, and carry a high risk of fetal abnormalities.
At the time, Zavos said that the process used to create the embryo was similar to that used to produce Dolly the cloned sheep, but with 'some modifications'. He claimed to have taken the genetic material of a man's skin cell, and 'fused' it with an egg cell emptied of its own DNA. The resulting cloned embryo, he said, was then implanted into the womb of the man's wife, who was infertile due to having prematurely undergone the menopause.
Last week, while not specifically stating why the procedure had failed, Zavos claimed the 'odds are not in favour' of a successful pregnancy, due to the relatively low success rates of IVF. But he said he would continue in his attempts, adding 'we are going to try again and again until we get it'. He also stated that his results would be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal 'in the near future'.
Sources and References
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Kentucky doctor says first attempt fails
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Attempt at human cloning has failed, says fertility doctor
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Human cloning attempt has failed
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