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Viable embryos have been created from dead people by fusing their cells with empty cow eggs, a controversial fertility scientist claimed on Tuesday.
Panayiotis Zavos, of the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Lexington, US, say his team has shown that cells taken from humans after death could be used for cloning. This latest work is purely experimental and no embryos were implanted for cloning, said Zavos, announcing the results at his own press conference in London, UK.
However, the claims were immediately met with both revulsion and scepticism from the UK scientific community.
The work is “both scientifically questionable and ethically unacceptable”, says Richard Gardner of the UK Royal Society's working group on stem cell research and cloning. “It is grossly misleading to suggest that you can replicate a loved one by producing a cloned person with the same genetic material.”
“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.
Panayiotis Zavos, of the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Lexington, US, say his team has shown that cells taken from humans after death could be used for cloning. This latest work is purely experimental and no embryos were implanted for cloning, said Zavos, announcing the results at his own press conference in London, UK.
However, the claims were immediately met with both revulsion and scepticism from the UK scientific community.
The work is “both scientifically questionable and ethically unacceptable”, says Richard Gardner of the UK Royal Society's working group on stem cell research and cloning. “It is grossly misleading to suggest that you can replicate a loved one by producing a cloned person with the same genetic material.”
“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.
