Fertility Doctor Clones Claims

The British Independent is reporting that a fertility doctor claims he’s on the verge of creating human clones. Trouble is, the man in question, Panayiotis Zavos, said the same thing in 2001, 2004, and 2006, but was unable to produce any evidence to back up his boast.

Brandon Keim at Wired Science points out that regardless of the accuracy of the claims, the video released in which Zavos makes his most recent statements was presumably shot in an undisclosed country in the Middle East, as human cloning is illegal in many places around the world and deemed unethical in many more. In fact, 59 of 192 United Nations member states surveyed last year explicitly prohibit reproductive cloning.

While there’s plenty of reason to suspect that Zavos is crying wolf in an attempt to grab publicity and attention—something he had already succeeded at multiple times by 2004, as American Journal of Bioethics Editor Glenn McGee pointed out—Kathryn Hinsch makes the case at the Women’s Bioethics Blog that the science behind cloning has come a long way in that same time, yet it’s still widely viewed as not just unethical, but unsafe.

The Guardian does a good job of capturing the long history of media circuses Zavos has conjured, but it’s also worth noting that in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences invited Zavos and two other researchers who boasted no published scientific work on cloning or related fields to participate in a panel on human cloning. In a letter to Science David Magnus and Arthur Caplan wrote about the dangers of giving them such a platform (sub’s req’d):

When the leading organization of scientists and physicians in the United States invites unqualified persons to sit as equals meriting the same consideration due to those who actually have conducted responsible research on the topic at issue, and when, as happened at the hearing, those on the fringe are permitted to deprecate the work of those who actually have published research on cloning, then the distinctions between science, pseudoscience, and nonscience (if not nonsense) are eroded.

In the current media landscape, this sort of headline grab has significant potential reach, but the dubious history of Zavos and his former collaborators should travel with it.

Tags: bioethics

Comments on this article

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.