Zavos clone paper will not be published

The Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics has 'pulled' a peer-reviewed paper on human cloning from controversial US fertility doctor Panos Zavos. This follows the news last month that he had made more unsubstantiated claims about his human cloning experiments.

Norman Gleicher, editor-in-chief of the journal, said that although the paper was in line to be published, the decision has been made to 'withdraw' it. 'We do not tolerate unauthorised pre-publication publicity', he said. The online news section of the journal Nature reports that Gleicher, while not disclosing the nature of the paper, was 'concerned by Zavos's public portrayal of the work'. He also said that Zavos misrepresented what the paper actually contained.

Zavos said that he had created embryo clones of an 11 year-old girl and a 33 year-old man, who both died in road accidents, and had taken money from their relatives for the experiments. He claimed to have taken genetic material from the cells of the two deceased people, and to have inserted it into cow eggs to create embryo clones. He said that the embryos then grew to the 64 cell stage, but that he would never consider putting the hybrid embryos back into a human womb. However, he did state that by using the same technique with human eggs, a true clone of a dead person could be developed. At the time, he said that data supporting the claim would be appearing in a peer-reviewed journal, although he did not name it.

Earlier this year, Zavos claimed that he had transferred a cloned human embryo into a 35-year old woman, but later said that she did not become pregnant. No evidence was ever brought forward to substantiate his assertions. Clinicians and scientists have described Zavos' many claims as publicity stunts, and have condemned him for attempting human cloning when the majority of the scientific community believe the procedure to be unsafe. Experiments in animals have shown that procedures used to clone mammals have an extremely low success rate, and carry a high risk of foetal abnormalities.