Panos Zavos and his cloning team announced about one and a half month ago they had produced a first cloned human embryo. A few weeks later, he declared in news interviews they were ready to implant this cloned embryo in a surrogate mother. Early in June, these results were also officially published in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine with several comments from well-known IVF specialists.
Today, in an interview with CellNEWS, Dr. Zavos say’s that NO transfer has taken place yet. Neither have any preimplantation genetic diagnosis – or PGD test – been performed on the claimed cloned embryo. This, Dr. Zavos tells, will be done just prior to the actual transfer of the embryo:
"The PGD and other tests will be done within 24-48 hrs prior to the transfer."
One question that arise is, how he and his team can be so confident of having produced a ’healthy’ cloned human embryo, that will sustain growth after implantation, without ANY tests performed at all! Another question is of course the reason for the delay to implant the purported cloned embryo. To these kinds of questions Dr. Zavos replies:
"This is our first embryo transfer for the time being. We do not release any other information on other cloned embryos."
As a critical bystander, I can only ask if this is just a slightly more sophisticated scam attempt to gain attention, compared with earlier claims of cloned human babies by his competitors in this field.
L.
Ed.
CellNEWS
