By Fay Schlesinger
Last updated at 5:17 PM on 22nd April 2009
'The cloned child is coming': Fertility specialist Panayiotis Zavos claims he has already cloned human embryos
A controversial doctor has claimed to have cloned human embryos and transferred them to four women prepared to give birth to the first cloned babies.
Fertility specialist Panayiotis Zavos sensationally broke the sacred taboo of human individuality by cloning 14 embryos and placing 11 of them into the wombs of four women, he told The Independent.
A British woman was alleged to be among the one single and three married patients who were said to be happy to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purpose of human reproduction.
The other women came from the United States and an unidentified country in the Middle East.
A documentary-maker told The Independent that he filmed the process as evidence that cloning took place, with the consent of the women.
The process, which is illegal in Britain and many other countries, was probably carried out in a secret laboratory in the Middle East, where cloning is not banned.
None of the embryo transfers led to a pregnancy but Dr Zavos, a naturalised American who runs fertility clinics in Kentucky and Cyprus, where he was born, said yesterday that this was just the 'first chapter' in his serious attempts at producing a baby cloned from the skin cells of its 'parent'.
He said: 'There is absolutely no doubt about it, and I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen.'
'If we intensify our efforts we can have a cloned baby within a year or two, but I don't know whether we can intensify our efforts to that extent.
'We're not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one.'
His claims are certain to be denounced by mainstream fertility scientists, who tried to gag Dr Zavos by asking the British media not to give him publicity without him providing evidence to back up his statements in 2004.
Despite a lower profile over the past five years, scores of couples are said to have approached Dr Zavos hoping that he will help them to overcome their infertility by using the same cloning technique that was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.
He said: 'I get enquiries every day. To date we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry is serious. The criteria is that they have to consider human reproductive cloning as the only option available to them after they have exhausted everything else.'
'We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don't participate in this.'
It took 277 attempts to create Dolly but since then the cloning procedure in animals has been refined and it has now become more efficient, although most experts in the field believe that it is still too dangerous to be allowed as a form of human fertility treatment.
Dr Zavos dismissed these fears saying that many of the problems related to animal cloning – such as congenital defects and oversized offspring – have been minimised.
CADY, THE LITTLE GIRL KILLED IN 2002 CAR CRASH WHO COULD 'LIVE' AGAIN AS A CLONE
She died at the age of ten in a horrific car crash, but now the little girl known only as Cady could be brought back to life by controversial fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos.
He froze some of her blood cells after her death in August 2002, and combined them with cow eggs to create a human-animal hybrid embryo.
Cady's mother said she was happy for the cells to be implanted in a human womb if there was a chance of a clone of her child being born.
Life after death: Cady, seen here as a baby, died when she was ten but could be recreated as a clone
'Cady was simply everything to me,' she said.
'If there is one chance in a billion that it would work, of course I want to do that.
'This is for Cady. This is a mother expressing love for a daughter and trying to give her daughter life.
What I am doing is trying to give her biological presence in this world continuation.'
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