LEXINGTON, (USA), Nov 16: The first cloned human embryos could be produced “pretty soon”, a scientist involved in a controversial international project to clone humans, Panayotis Zavos, said on Thursday.

“We will be attempting pretty soon the first nuclear transfers,” Zavos told AFP in an interview. “As we speak, we are running now.”

He said the production of the cloned embryos would take place sometime before the end of the year, or at the start of 2002 at the latest, but would not give an exact date.

Ten couples who are unable to have children on their own are participating in his research, conducted in two secret laboratories in one or two countries which Zavos refused to name.

“We’ve done it in animals, and we’ve done nuclear transfers of human cells into an animal ovocyte, but we haven’t done a nuclear transfer of a human cell into a human ovocyte,” or early-stage egg, Zavos said.

Zavos, a Greek Cypriot naturalized US citizen, belongs to an international consortium of about 12 specialists on human reproduction, including Italian physician Severino Antinori, which in January announced plans to clone a human being.

Zavos and Antinori said they would eventually impregnate up to 200 women with cloned embryos.

Their initial target is to create embryos by transferring the nucleus of a cell from one of the two parents into an ovocyte extracted from a woman.

These three-to-five-day-old embryos will then be frozen and studied to determine whether they present genetic, biochemical or physiological flaws, explained Zavos, director of the Andrology Institute here, which specializes in treatment of male sterility.—AFP