Worry more about the cloning lawmakers have allowed
here, says family group

The kind of cloning that former University of Kentucky researcher Panayiotis Zavos announced yesterday that he was doing oversees is bad, says a Lexington, Kentucky-based family group, but what the State Legislature has allowed his former university employer to do is even worse.

Zavos, who heads the Andrology Institute of American in Lexington, announced on Monday night's "Connie Chung Tonight" that he will help a couple produce a baby through the procedure of human cloning in an undesignated foreign location.

"We should be at least as concerned about what the state legislature has allowed state universities to do right here in Kentucky as what Zavos says he can do overseas," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst with The Family Foundation of Kentucky.  "Zavos wants to use a procedure that may result in the death of a child," said Cothran, "UK and U of L want to use a cloning procedure that always, without exception, leads to the death of the child.  The Kentucky General Assembly needs to restrict both procedures."

Because of the failure of an anti-cloning measure in the Kentucky Senate earlier this year, the state's universities were given the green light on so-called "therapeutic cloning," in which the unborn child is used for experimentation purposes and then discarded.  Zavos wants to use the procedure for so-called reproductive cloning, which is intended to produce a live birth, but which is plagued with uncertainty and questions regarding the health of the resulting child as well as questions regarding to what use the child produced might be put.

"What Zavos does overseas is out of our control, but what our universities here in Kentucky do is entirely within our control," said Cothran.

The Kentucky General Assembly could take up the issue again in next year's session.

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The Family Foundation of Kentucky is a nonprofit educational organization dealing with issues affecting Kentucky families.