18 January 2004	Sunday	25 Ziqa'ad 1424

LONDON, Jan 17: A maverick US-based fertility expert claimed a scientific first on Saturday, saying he had implanted a cloned human embryo into a woman and was looking for more volunteers.

Some experts were sceptical about the assertion by Dr Panos Zavos, who said he was still waiting to see if the implantation, performed at an undisclosed location, had been successful.

"We transferred the first cloned embryo into a 35-year-old woman. Since it has not been two weeks since we transferred the embryo, we are waiting for the results of the pregnancy," he said at a stunned news conference in London.

His shock announcement was immediately denounced by the British government, which noted the practice was illegal in Britain, and drew condemnation from the Vatican.

"We made a manifesto commitment to prevent this happening in the UK and we acted swiftly to deliver this commitment by passing the Human Reproductive Cloning Act at the end of 2001," Health Secretary John Reid said.

"This explicitly bans any attempt to create a cloned human baby in the UK. We are also working to achieve a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning through the United Nations."

It also drew scepticism from other quarters.

"This is not the first time Doctor Zavos has made claims without producing any form of evidence to substantiate them," Patrick Cusworth of anti-abortion charity LIFE told reporters.

"LIFE as an organization would probably greet Doctor Zavos's latest claim with a certain amount of scepticism.

"However if what Dr Zavos says turns out to be true, I would say that he has exposed this 35-year-old woman's vulnerability to almost incredible risk," he added.

Vice-president of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life and the former head of the Bioethics Institute at Sacred Heart Medical College, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, described it as "an offence to human beings".

"It seems that the moral position, not just the position of the Church, is shared by all," he said. "Now we have to see what the political authorities will do about it."

Dr Zavos said the embryo he had implanted in the unidentified woman, who was entering premature menopause, had grown from an egg harvested from her own body and fertilized with DNA taken from skin cells donated by her infertile husband.

He said the skin cells were transformed into a "species" of cells that were fused with the egg.

"After that happened the fusion took place. The activation took place. The embryo took off and developed properly. It was a very healthy-looking embryo. We decided with the consent of the patient to transfer that embryo, and we did," he said.

"We are very optimistic that the results will be positive."

He admitted that the chances of the woman's pregnancy going to term were slim, but said he would continue until he had success.

"We are very realistic about the fact that we could fail here. But we have done a first embryo transfer and we are going to do another one and another one and another one until we succeed," Dr Zavos said.

IVF expert Eric Simons told Sky News the results from animal cloning were not very promising, and expressed serious concern at the possibility the practice had now been switched to humans.

"I think this is a worrying development. To dive into human cloning - and we have not even spoken about the ethical problems here - but on the physical side to dive in with what sounds like fairly thin research sounds very worrying," he said.