Sect Claims First Cloned Baby nytimes.com
[ the cloning story has sort of gone out of control, a recent roundup for the record ]
The Raëlian group was founded by Claude Vorilhon, a former race car driver, who says he was inspired to act after being visited by aliens on Dec. 13, 1973, at the caldera of a volcano in the Auvergne region of France.
Outrage Over Cloning Claim nytimes.com
Many scientists are skeptical of the claim, announced on Friday by a private company linked to the Raëlians, a sect that believes space travelers created the human race by cloning. But other experts, along with members of Congress on both sides of the debate over human cloning, said that true or not, the claim could have immense implications.
"What a sad day for science," said Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director of Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass., a company that has cloned human embryos to provide cells for research but not to create babies. "What they've claimed to have done is both appalling and scientifically irresponsible, and whether or not it's true, they have done a tremendous disservice to all of us in the scientific community. The backlash could cripple an area of medical research that could cure millions of people, and it would be tragic if this announcement results in a ban on all forms of cloning.
"It's the announcement that the religious right and anti-abortion groups have been praying for," Dr. Lanza said.
Reporter Becomes Actor in Human Clone Drama nytimes.com
From Clonaid's perspective, Dr. Guillen — who says he is not a member or employee of the sect, the Raëlians — is brimming with credibility. He has a doctorate in theoretical physics, mathematics and astronomy from Cornell University. He taught physics to undergraduates at Harvard. He is an Emmy-award-winning science journalist who appeared regularly on "Good Morning America," `20/20" and other ABC news programs for 14 years before leaving the network in October.
But Dr. Guillen's critics say that as a reporter he was too credulous of fantastic pseudoscience claims, citing his earnest news reports about astrology, ESP, healing at a distance, auras and cold fusion — topics dismissed by most scientists as nonsense.
Religious Sect Says It Will Announce the First Cloned Baby nytimes.com
The typical success rate with animals is about 2 percent, said George Seidel, a researcher at Colorado State University who has cloned cattle, "so one would have to have at least 50 such operations."
Also, Dr. Seidel said, cloned animals have a high rate of unexplained defects, including malformed kidneys, hearts and lungs, and often die within days of birth. "Ten percent abnormalities might be acceptable for cloning cows," he said. "But it's completely unacceptable for human children."
In his book "The Final Message," Mr. Vorilhon says he was renamed Raël by the aliens and described how they descended from a soundless flying saucer and explained to him how parts of the Bible were actually garbled accounts of their earlier visits.
Today, the Raëlians, based in Geneva, call their organization "an atheistic religion" and claim 55,000 followers worldwide, mostly in Canada, France and East Asia. Among other things, they believe cloning is the path to eternal life, transferring memories and consciousness from one copy to the next.
Raël said in an interview today that the announcement was "not a big deal." He said the next step would be to discover how to accelerate the growth process from two decades to a few hours and how to transfer a person's consciousness to a new body.
"Cloning a baby is just a step," he said. "I want to give human beings eternal life."
Experts Are Suspicious of Claim of Cloned Human's Birth nytimes.com
Dr. Jacques Cohen, the scientific director of assisted reproduction at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., said he that if he did not know about the difficulty researchers had trying to clone monkeys, he would have thought that humans would be easy to clone because fertility experts have spent years perfecting techniques to handle human eggs in the laboratory and to grow human embryos for a few days in a lab. But the monkey work, he said, gave him pause.
Dr. Dominko, one of the principle researchers trying to clone monkeys, spent three years, and made more than 300 attempts, to no avail. Working at the Oregon Primate Research Center, at a well-financed laboratory, she and her colleagues never got a single pregnancy. Instead, the cloning efforts produced grotesquely abnormal embryos, some with cells with no chromosomes, some with multiple nuclei, including one cell had nine nuclei. She called the embryos her "gallery of horrors."
Behind a Cult and Cloning nytimes.com
The group's founder was Claude Vorilhon, a French race car journalist who said he encountered space aliens in 1973 while out walking near a volcano in France. He said the aliens traveled by flying saucer and revealed that they were the Elohim mentioned in the Bible — not God, but beings from afar who had engineered the creation of the human race on Earth from inert DNA. They named Vorilhon "Raël" and asked him to tell mankind the true story of its creation.
The Raëlian Movement, which claims 40,000 members in France, Canada, Japan and elsewhere, believes humanity is scientifically advanced enough to comprehend its origins, to create life from inert matter, and thus to achieve, through human cloning, eternal life. . . .
Unlike Noyes, Raël is no communitarian visionary, but sensuality and sexuality have long been a feature of Raëlian doctrines. In 1987, the Raëlians published a small book, "Sensual Meditation," with a cover showing two nude women in erotic postures and a text that urges the reader to "uninhibit oneself."
RAEL has also published a message from the Elohim asking "our last Prophet, Raël, to found a religious order that will bring together young women who wish conscientiously to put at the service of their creators and of their Prophets their interior and exterior beauty when we arrive at the embassy." "While awaiting our arrival," the message continued, "they shall prepare themselves for this day of such hope in placing themselves at the service of the Last Prophet, Raël, and in seeing to his well being when necessary."
F.D.A. Exploring Human Cloning Claim nytimes.com
Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, the chief scientist at Clonaid, the company the sect founded, says that she is a Raëlian "bishop," but it is likely that human cloning ultimately will have nothing to do with Raël's quest for eternal life or anybody's drive for perfection.
The Raëlians believe that a race of alien scientists cloned themselves to create humans and that these superior aliens will return to earth only when the entire human population learns of their existence. Generating publicity is therefore part of the group's religious mission, experts on the sect say, and Friday's press conference at a Holiday Inn in Hollywood, Fla., received worldwide attention. |
