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Date Posted: 03:28:11 12/21/02 Sat
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 209.252.119.8
Subject: first cloned baby human by Christmas

Sect expecting cloned baby girl
Fringe group says U.S. woman will give birth to replica this month
COLIN NICKERSON
Boston Globe

MONTREAL - A Canadian sect that believes life on Earth was created by superintelligent space aliens says one of its female followers is carrying the world's first human clone, and that the baby will be delivered on or about Christmas.

The Raelians are a Quebec-based, free-love sect whose efforts to replicate humans have horrified ethicists and mainstream scientists. The sect is believed to have spent millions of dollars in the effort to fulfill one of the visions of its French-born founder, Claude Vorilhon, who calls himself the Prophet Rael.

The movement's bishop and chief scientist, Brigette Boisselier, said Thursday that the sect's biotech company, Clonaid, has implanted an American woman with a clone of herself and that the baby will be delivered by Caesarean section.

"It would be nice" if the baby could be born on Christmas, Boisselier told Canada's CTV television.

"We are well-advanced and the first baby is due for the end of this year," Boisselier, a biochemist, said in a separate interview. "We are expecting a healthy girl."

Experts reacted with skepticism and anger to the announcement, which came weeks after Italian scientist Severino Antinori said his research team was working with a woman who will give birth to a cloned boy in January.

"These are totally irresponsible experiments, and these people are totally without scientific credibility," said Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology and an internationally renowned transgenic researcher at MIT's Whitehead Institute. "Their tales are fantastic."

Vorilhon, 55, made world headlines earlier this year when he testified before the U.S. Congress during a debate on human cloning, defending it as the "key to eternal life. That's the goal."

The Raelians were forced to close a West Virginia laboratory two years ago after the federal government warned the group it would not allow human-cloning experiments. The sect has refused to disclose where its ongoing experiments are taking place.

The race to create the first human clone is being run by rogue experimenters such as the Raelians, operating on the edges of the law and social acceptance.

Boisselier said the cloned baby was created by taking genetic material from an infertile woman and inserting it into an egg cell taken from another Raelian female follower. The embryo was then transplanted into the uterus of the mother-to-be, who -- if the story is true -- is carrying an exact genetic duplicate of herself.

"My first reaction is that this is a hoax," said Arthur Leader, chief of reproductive medicine at Ottawa Hospital and a professor of obstetrics at the University of Ottawa. "My other reaction is disgust. This shows disrespect for human embryos and demeans our humanity."

The Raelians have offered no hard evidence that they have created an embryonic clone or even that they are carrying out serious scientific experiments. But the movement, which claims 5,000 followers -- mainly in French Canada, Europe and Japan -- is believed to have substantial financial assets and reportedly has operated laboratories in Canada, Switzerland, and South Korea, as well in the United States.

Vorilhon has boasted that the sect has 100 specially chosen female adherents -- members of an elite "Order of Angels" -- who are lending their eggs and wombs to clone experimentation. Some observers believe that in the long run, willing women, a steady supply of eggs and an indifference to world opprobrium are the crucial ingredients to eventual success.

"They appear to have resources, and human cloning is not technologically out of the question," said Mike Kropveld, executive director of Info-Cult, a Montreal-based organization that tracks fringe religious movements. "Still, most people are skeptical that they are even really involved in anything. They may be just mining the mother lode of free publicity."

Based in Valcourt, Quebec -- where the sect operates a space alien theme park called UFOland -- the Raelians advocate free love and believe extraterrestrials hatched humanity in a laboratory 25,000 years ago, then transplanted the new race to Earth.

"They are re-enacting their own creation myths," Susan Palmer, a professor of religion at Dawson College in Montreal and author of a forthcoming book on the Raelians, told the Globe and Mail newspaper.

Vorilhon founded the sect in 1973 after claiming to encounter green-skinned beings emerging from a flying saucer during a mountain hike. Raelians teach that the aliens explained that humanity had been created through DNA technology, then whisked Vorilhon to their planet where his sexual needs were serviced by female robots and where he met Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha.

Boisselier said that as soon as the cloned baby is born, the group would allow blood tests comparing the DNA of mother and child.

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