Doctor Makes Human Cloning Claims

(CBS)  A shocking headline from a controversial American fertility doctor: "I can clone a human being."

It's a claim Dr. Panayiotis Zavos has made before. Five years ago, he told a news conference that he had implanted a cloned human embryo into an unnamed woman - an embryo that should have produced a replica of her husband.

There was no evidence, and few details, reports CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar.

"I did not give any specifics for a reason," Zavos told CBS News back in 2004.

Now working in a secret clinic, the Discovery Channel has filmed the doctor.

"If the implantation is successful, as well, and the pregnancy is maintained, as we say in the U.S. we have a home run," he says in the film.

Zavos claims to have transplanted 11 cloned embryos into the wombs of four women. None resulted in a pregnancy.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, one of the U.K.'s largest daily newspapers, Zavos, an American born in Cyprus, 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."

In addition, Zavos said he has cloned the embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old U.S. girl, who died in a car crash, the newspaper reported, after the grieving families apparently approached him and granted him permission to harvest cells from their bodies.

Zavos then says he used them to create human-animal hybrid models that would help him to study the cloning procedure, the newspaper reports.

His critics say he's again seeking publicity, walking a minefield of ethics and laws.

[rf35]

This guy sounds like he's cracked and making wild claims with no basis in fact. Why are people so obsessed with reproducing? Don't we have enough people on the planet already? Here's a big "thank you" to all the couples who choose not to have children. Maybe people want children so they will have someone to care for them in their old age. Maybe they want more people paying into Social Security. Trouble is, it always takes more and more to make it work, especially with people living longer. Like the herd of deer that gets so big that there is no longer enough food in their territory to sustain them, the human race is breeding itself into extinction. I suppose it's the price we pay for being on top of the food chain. Human cloning shouldn't be illegal for the ethical reasons being praded about now, it should be illegal because it adds more people to the already overpopulated world.


Death to OPEC

[Hal9King]

Coning is the easy part -- finding the honest politician will be the hardest.

[tincup356]

Now if they could create an honest politician,,,,clone him about 550 times and replace the broken greedy NON-representatives we have in Washington now,,,,we might have a chance to save America.

[bobbob111111]

i have twin sisters. there are twins, triplets, etc all over the planet.
cloning doesn't bother me in the least. i believe only the ignorant
will be bothered by such discoveries.

sooner or later we'll discover many other things that are uncomfortable to us.
we should be using this as an opportunity to figure out how to handle the power
that knowledge can give us. so we don't harm ourselves or others.

one of the best ways to do this can be found at this web site:
thezeitgeistmovement.com. check it out.

[rixmix98]

WHAT IF? These two words have opened more doors and lead to the discovery of many new things. Perhaps cloning humans will open another door? What is on the other side will be challenge. To control mans attempts to question curiosity is to committ scientific suicide and disrupts the very balance of nature that controls mankind itself. We will see.
Posted by Dgunner at 6:13 AM : Apr 22, 2009


So perfectly stated!

[legacyabq]

Why bother cloning??

We're still mortal..


Try to understand that there is no escape from the cycle of life and death..

The larger systems go on...

But we WILL die someday and cloning doesnt change that..

Remember, a body is just a body..

A mind, an identity, is a unique thing that will never exist again..

You can clone someones body, but that doesnt truly make them the SAME person

[lotusforest]

why bother being ignorant? cloning is not about immortality. its cloning. and to find out cures for diseases. some are already cured by parents having another child for a tissue transplant, bone marrow, or whatever they do.

[legacyabq]

Posted by caleemodrt at 8:49 AM

??

Cloning a human body makes another copy of the body

Thats not the same thing as a person , or a consciousness, or an individual identity..

What, do people think that the clone would remember who the other person was or something??

Rediculous..

They would grow up wondering WHY they were created, like frankenstein, only to IMITATE someone they never knew, and are not OF, only MADE of....

[lotusforest]

clones could have a genetic memory. abstergo company used a device called animus on a person called desmond miles. he is the descendant of altair ibn la-ahad of the assassin clan that lived in 1191 as part of the third crusade in the holy land. they succesfully accessed the ancestor's memories.

I'm not making this up, its an actual story in Assassin's Creed.

[glidescube]

clones have souls but clowns give me the creeps. So please dont clone clowns

[caleemodrt]

I know a couple who lost a child tragically in a car accident. The death of the child distroyed the marriage. If the child had been able to have been cloned, it might have saved the marriage. However, the family created a scholorship fund to memorilize their child. We simply do not have the wisdom to offset the knowledge of his kind of human cloning. The world is full of variables, hopfully, human cloning, done with great consideration could lead to a positive outcome though temporary at best.

[sly_64]

Really should be concentrating on stem cell research instead.