Making babies

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Dr. Panayiotis Zavos.

Notorious human cloning scientist Dr. Panayiotis Zavos defends his controversial research and tells Kat Slowe why the Middle East is a potential haven for cloning technology.

Madam, would you prefer to give birth to your own clone or that of your husband?

It may sound absurd, but this question could soon become very real for some infertile couples, according to Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, a world-renowned cloning scientist.

“The husband will say ‘my wife is beautiful, I want another one just like her,’” Zavos says. “Or they will say I would like to have a boy, which means we have to go to the husband.”

With his human cloning research already at an advanced stage, the notorious professor claims it will not be long until the first cloned child is born. In 2003, Zavos and his team successfully cloned the first human embryo for reproductive purposes and, in 2006, they created the first human and bovine hybrid embryo for controlled study. Now, Zavos has successfully managed to transfer cloned embryos into the wombs of four women, though none as yet has succeeded in carrying to term.

His latest achievement, creating a hybrid human and cow embryo from the blood cells of a dead American child called Cady, provoked outrage in some quarters. But this negative feedback has had little impact on Zavos’ ambition. The Cypriot, who identifies himself as Middle Eastern and claims to have a laboratory in the region, is patently eager to speak out against his critics and defend his research.

In fact, Zavos admits to recently courting the controversy by travelling to the UK to speak to the British press, his argument being that if he can survive their censure he will be capable of “surviving anything:” “If I can survive the Lord Winston’s and all those clones of his, then I’m okay.”

Lord Winston, a member of the House of Lords and a leading fertility expert, is one of Zavos’ better known and more enduring critics. He and Zavos first met at a one on one debate on human cloning at the Oxford Union in 2001. Zavos asserts that he won the debate, even though he failed to obtain the majority vote.

“I debated Lord Winston at Oxford Union, one on one, and won the debate, because we started 100 percent against me and we ended up at the end of the debate 70/30. It wasn’t bad in fifteen minutes to switch 30 percent of the vote.”

It is a pity for the professor that not everyone is so easy to convince.

“A lot of people ask: do you guarantee 100 percent success as far as this or that? And some of those people obviously know that we do not exist in a perfect world, but they like to joke with me, because that is a joke.”

Zavos blames Dolly the sheep for a lot of the misconceptions that have arisen in the cloning debate. Dolly was born in Scotland in 1996 and was the first mammal to be successfully cloned by scientists. Named after country and western singer Dolly Parton, she lived for six years, before dying from a progressive lung disease.

“I had debates with some so-called-intelligent people, such as Lord Winston, where he said to me ‘look at Dolly the sheep,’” Zavos says. “And I said: ‘why is it that I need to look at Dolly the sheep? Dolly the sheep is one lousy observation. Mr. Know it all, have you ever done a study with one observation? Have you ever tested a drug and approved a drug based upon one observation?’ And that is where the whole argument begins.

“Dolly didn’t live to be a hundred. Dolly didn’t have an IQ problem. They tried that in front of the Congress of the United States, sitting next to me. I had to remind the Congress of the United States that we do not have an IQ test for sheep.”

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