based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women in an interview published Wednesday. Dr. Panayiotis Zavos told Britain's Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “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.” Dr. Zavos, , a naturalized US citizen born in Cyprus, was filmed allegedly carrying out the procedure by an independent documentary maker in a secret laboratory in the Middle East, the paper said. Ethical questions The procedures were recorded by a documentary maker and were to be shown on the Discovery Channel in Britain later Wednesday. Dr. Zavos's work is widely condemned by mainstream fertility experts, who question whether the technique, which also raises complex ethical questions, is safe. Although other scientists have created human cloned embryos in test tubes to extract stem cells for research, Zavos has broken a taboo by actually putting them inside women's wombs. He said he has also produced cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old girl called Cady who died in a car crash in the US. The child's blood cells were frozen and sent to Dr. Zavos who has fertility clinics in America and Cyprus. He uses the same technique as was used to clone Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. In 2004, Dr. Zavos claimed to have implanted the first human cloned embryo into a woman's uterus although scientists then expressed skepticism over a lack of proof about his findings. ‘New Scientist' editorial The New Scientist said in an editorial Wednesday “the whole media circus surrounding the claims and the way that these ‘pioneers' court publicity always leaves a sour taste in the mouth.” Commenting on the Independent's coverage that includes a picture of the little girl killed in a car crash alongside a headline in the paper describing her as ‘The little girl who could ‘live' again', the New Scientist said: “This perpetuates the cruel myth and widespread misconception that cloning is a way of raising the dead. In fact, if it worked, it would simply be a way of creating an identical twin of whoever was cloned, but separated in time.” The editorial also raised the ethical issue, saying: “Experience in animals has demonstrated time and time again that the technique usually fails: many embryos are malformed, and many are abnormally oversized, posing risks both to offspring and mother. Whether it would be ‘ethical', if incontrovertibly safe, is a whole new debate. But there's no doubt that if a cloned baby is ever verifiably produced, the scientist behind it will achieve lifelong fame – or possibly infamy.”
