Controversial fertility specialist Panayiotis Zavos says he will begin human cloning procedures with seven couples within two months in a foreign country.

Leading scientists and Congress are taking his claims seriously. Monday night on CNN, Zavos, whose clinic is in Lexington, Ky., produced the first couple to claim publicly they will have a cloned baby. The couple, who disguised their identity, said they had tried unsuccessfully to have a baby using standard in vitro fertilization.
"It has been a rather long and tortuous path to get here, but we believe we have what it takes," Zavos said Tuesday in an interview, "and we feel quite confident that this rather complex project can be done."

Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., says he is certain Zavos will try to clone a human, but doubts he will be successful. "This is human experimentation and it is reprehensible," Weldon says.

Weldon led an effort earlier this year on Capitol Hill to make human cloning illegal. The bill also would have banned cloning research for medical treatments. It passed in the House but failed in the Senate.

Last year, the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel to address Zavos' intentions and those of two other groups to clone humans. The panel concluded that human cloning should be banned. Scientific studies in animals revealed significant risks: birth defects and high rates of miscarriage. Scientists had to create nearly 300 embryos to achieve the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal. Success rates in animal cloning overall are at best 10% to 20%.

"Studies of the cloning of animals have indicated very real safety concerns both for the clone and the mother," says Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution, who co-chaired last year's NAS panel. "It seems unwise to proceed to clone a human being."

Zavos says he has put together a team of nine people who specialize in cloning and in vitro fertilization techniques, and that he has developed procedures for monitoring the health of cloned embryos and of fetuses during all stages of pregnancy.

He says that scientists who are cloning animals are using bad techniques.

"If you are doing it the way of the animal cloners, yes, there is a risk," Zavos says. "We have the science of maternal fetal medicine, and we will be monitoring the pregnancies very carefully."

Zavos says the couple, who call themselves Bill and Kathy, will use DNA from Kathy to implant in the egg of a surrogate, whose DNA has been removed from the egg. The clone will be Kathy's twin. It will not have any genes from Bill.

Jamie Grifo, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, says that the couple has options other than cloning, including one using the husband's sperm, a donor egg and another woman to carry the fetus.

But Zavos says the couple has no other option, and that cloning will become, now or later, another way of helping infertile couples have babies.

"I want America to realize we are not monsters and that we don't create monsters," Zavos say. "We are doing nothing other than helping people to complete their life cycles."