David Rorvik

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David Rorvik (born 1944) is an American journalist who authored the 1978 book In His Image: the Cloning of a Man, in which he claimed to have been part of a successful experiment to create a clone of a human being.

At the time of the book's publication, Rorvik was a science writer and medical reporter for both Time and The New York Times, and had written numerous books including Your Baby's Sex: Now You Can Choose (1971, with Landrum B. Shettles). In In his Image, Rorvik claimed that in 1973 a wealthy businessman he dubbed "Max" had contacted him and recruited him to find scientists willing to create a clone of him. Rorvik claims to have formed a scientific team that was taken to a lab on a secret island "beyond Hawaii." After five years of experimentation they managed to create a human egg cell, insert "Max's" DNA, and implant the egg into the uterus of a surrogate mother, a local island resident called "Sparrow." The child was supposedly born nine months later.

Before the book was published, the New York Post learned of the story and made it front-page news on March 3, 1978. Soon after, NBC's Tom Brokaw interviewed Rorvik on The Today Show. The book was very popular and caused much discussion about the ethics of cloning. However, scientists including Yale University professor Clement Markert generally disbelieved Rorvik's claims. The supposed procedures were based on outdated methods that had been successfully used to clone a frog, but that would not have worked for a mammal egg cell. When British scientist Derek Bromhall found that Rorvik had used his doctoral thesis as the theoretical basis for the cloning process without his permission, he sued Rorvik's publisher J. B. Lippincott. Lawyers and journalists pressured Rorvik to reveal the identity of "Max," but he refused. In February 1981, judge John Fullam ruled that the book was a "fraud and a hoax." The next year, Lippincott settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and made a statement to the press that they now believed that the book to be fictitious. Rorvik himself denied that there had been any hoax.

Rorvik has since has written and edited several books on diet and nutrition, including the Physician Desk Reference for Nutritional Supplements (2001). He wrote an article defending In His Image for Omni in 1997.