David Rorvik (B ?) Is a US journalist who wrote a book In His Image for an alleged cloning of a human being.

David Rorvik was a science writer and medical reporter for both Time and the New York Times. In 1978 he published a book In His Image: the Cloning of a Man where he claimed to have been part of a successful attempt to create a clone of a human being.

Rorvik claimed that 1973 a wealthy businessman he dubbed "Max" had contacted him and recruited him to find scientists willing to create a clone of him. Rorvik had 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 it with "Max"'s DNA and implant the egg into the uterus of a surrogate mother, local resident called "Sparrow". The child was supposedly born nine months later.

Before the book was published, New York Post made it the front-page news on March 3 1978. Tom Brokaw interviewed Rorvik on the Today Show. The book was very popular and caused lots of discussion about the ethics of cloning.

However, scientists, including Yale scientist Clement Markert , generally disbelieved Rorvik's claims. The supposed procedures were based on old methods that had been 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, he sued Rorvik's publisher J. B. Lippincot .

Lawyers and journalists pressured Rorvik to reveal the real identity of "Max" but he refused. In February 1981, judge John Fullam ruled that the book was a "fraud and a hoax". Next year J. B. Lippincott settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and made a press statement that they now believed that the book was fictitious. Rorvik himself, however, denied there was a hoax.