Five research teams are in the world-wide race to produce the first cloned human baby, which could be born in 2003, US andrologist Dr Panos Zavos said on Wednesday.
”This technology is developing very fast,” Zavos, a fertility specialist, testified before a subcommittee of Congress.
”My sentiment is that it can’t take place this year. The birth will be in 2003,” he said.
Besides Zavos’ own researchers, a group of Italians led by gynaecologist Severino Antinori and another headed by French chemist Brigitte Boisselier, are among those now in the race, Zavos said.
”I know of several teams which are making a great deal of progress,” especially in Russia and China, Zavos said, insisting that his goal, however, was to beat them to it.
”We are playing here to win and to win first,” he said, but added: ”The Chinese will probably be bypassing us”.
When asked about his own progress, Zavos, director of the Andrology Institute of America, a clinic in Lexington, Kentucky that treats male infertility, said he has not begun his own trials.
”I have produced no human cloned embryos,” he testified under oath. ”I have no cloned pregnancies”.
But he cast doubt on his former Italian teammate, Antinori, who claims three women are at the moment pregnant with cloned human embryos in the former republics of the Soviet Union and ”in a Muslim country”.
”I have good reasons to believe those reports are not true,” he said. – Sapa-AFP