Raelians

Articles on the Raelian Movement

2000 - 2002

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Baby girl born through cloning: Raelian cult
(Reuters, December 27, 2002)

A human baby has been born through cloning, the first on record, French scientist and member of the 
Raelian cult Brigitte Boisselier claimed.

The baby girl was born Thursday by caesarean section and the birth "went very well," Boisselier, president 
of the human cloning society Clonaid, said in a telephone interview with AFP.   Because the effort by 
the Raelians to achieve the first human birth by cloning was carried out in secrecy, it was not 
immediately possible to obtain any independent scientific confirmation that the baby was in fact a clone.
Boisselier, a 46-year-old French chemist who is president of the Clonaid human cloning society, 
declined to give further details of the birth, saying, "I prefer not to say more for now." She added that 
a full press conference was scheduled here on Friday.

Nor would she say whether the baby would be presented at the press conference.
"We are very happy. It's a triumph," Clonaid spokeswoman Nadine Gary said earlier.

If scientifically confirmed by independent sources, it would be the first human baby produced by 
the highly controversial technique -- and announced publicly.

It would also mark the beginning of a new era in human reproduction -- the first asexual birth, 
the first time a child was produced that was not the product of a genetic mix of mother and father, 
but the identical reproduction of one of its parents.

In this case, Boisselier told AFP on November 27, the baby born Thursday would be an identical twin 
of its mother, albeit many years apart in age.

She then said that an American couple was expecting the first birth by cloning, a baby girl, near the 
end of the year.

Cloning provides a genetic duplicate of another creature.

The predominant method around the world entails removing the nucleus, or core, from an egg 
and replacing it with DNA from a donor. This DNA "reprograms" the egg, transferring into it the 
entire genetic code of the donor.

Clonaid, which is based in Las Vegas, Nevada, was founded in 1997 by the Raelians, who claim 
55,000 followers worldwide.

The Raelians believe that life on Earth was established by extra-terrestrials who arrived in flying 
saucers 25,000 years ago, and that humans themselves were created by cloning.

The movement's founder, Rael -- the former French journalist Claude Vorilhon -- lives in Quebec. 
He describes himself as a prophet and claims that cloning will enable humanity to attain eternal life.

William Muir, professor of genetics at Purdue University in Indiana, questioned how the cloned baby, 
assuming it survives infancy, would develop into "a normal person."

"They might have done a lot of experimentation before that," he said in a telephone interview 
Thursday night. "The end does not justify the means. There are things that are not ethical to do, 
like experimenting with humans."

Muir said the cloning process involves "reprogramming of the genetic code. But in cows, pigs and mice, 
we don't know if their behavior is normal because we cannot test their mental abilities."

The big problem, according to scientists, is to ensure that all the genes in this transferred code work 
properly, performing the dazzlingly complex business which is the making of tissue and the repairing of it.

Wide-ranging tests in lab animals, and the experience of cloned farm animals including Dolly the Sheep, 
have found that -- even though all the genes are there -- many of them do not appear to switch on and 
off as they should.

Malfunctioning genes can cause an embryo to become malformed, prompting the body to expel it in a 
miscarriage.

Many biotechnologists are repelled by the ethical dilemma posed by human cloning as well as the risk 
to the first cloned babies, and many governments have raced to pass laws that ban reproductive cloning.

Yet this has not prevented a race among scientific mavericks to become the first to clone a human.

US fertility specialist Panos Zavos told the US Congress in May that five groups of scientists were racing 
to produce the first cloned human baby. In late November, Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori said a 
woman carrying a cloned human embryo was expected to give birth in early January.

Last month, the United States pledged to work in good faith for a global ban on human cloning after 
delaying for a year United Nations consideration of a treaty it did not believe went far enough.

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Raelians Front and Center on Cloning

by Joseph B. Verrengia (AP, December 27, 2002)

The religious sect connected to the company claiming it has produced the first human clone is 
clearly unlike anything that science has grappled with.

The group's founder says he met little green space aliens on a visit to a French volcano in the 1970s. 
That man — a former French journalist named Claude Vorilhon, who now calls himself Rael — says 
the extraterrestrials told him they created life on earth through genetic engineering.

Brigitte Boisselier, the chemist who made Friday's cloning announcement, is a Raelian herself — a 
bishop, in fact.

At the news conference she appeared to be wearing the Raelian silver medallion combining the Star of 
David and a snowflake, symbolizing infinite time and space.

Cloning humans is at the heart of the Raelian theology of "scientific creation," which they describe as 
an alternative to both Darwinian evolution and creation dogma of the major religions.

"Cloning is the key to eternal life," Rael says. The group claims 55,000 devotees worldwide and operates 
its own theme park, UFOland, near Montreal.

During the 1990s, Quebec granted religious status to the Raelian movement. Its representatives have 
conducted condom distribution programs aimed at Canadian teenagers. They also have tried to persuade 
Roman Catholics to renounce their faith, prompting lawsuits.

Clonaid, the first human cloning company, was founded in February 1997, right after Scottish scientists 
announced the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult.

Rael and a group of investors created Valiant Venture Ltd., a corporation based in the Bahamas, to 
run Clonaid, a project whose main goal is produce the first human clone.

Clonaid says on its Web site that after pressure from the Bahamian government — which feared the 
experiments might be conducted on one of its islands — Valiant Ventures was dissolved. In 2000, 
Rael handed the Clonaid project over to Boisselier.

Boisselier formerly taught chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton,and worked as marketing director 
for a unidentified large chemical company in France.

In interviews, she has said her 24-year-old daughter would be among the young women in the movement 
who would carry cloned babies to term.

Experts have dismissed the notion that Clonaid is capable of producing a human clone because 
Boisselier does not have a track record in the field of either animal cloning or human reproduction.

But Rael has said: "Nothing can stop science."

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Canadian Sect Says First Cloned Baby Due in Weeks

by Patrick White (Reuters, December 19, 2002)

A Canadian cult that believes in free love and that life on earth was created by extra terrestrials said 
it could deliver the world's first cloned baby on Christmas day.

But the announcement by the Quebec-based Raelians sect was greeted on Thursday with anger and 
skepticism from experts in the field.

"I am personally disgusted," said Arthur Leader, chief of reproductive medicine at the Ottawa Hospital. 
"It shows disrespect for human embryos and it demeans our humanity," he said.

Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop in the sect, said their company, Clonaid, cloned a human embryo last 
March and a baby girl is expected to be delivered within the next two weeks and possibly on Christmas 
Day.

"We are well advanced and the first baby is due for the end of this year. We think it will be a healthy 
baby," Boisselier told Reuters.

She said 10 human embryos were cloned last spring, with five miscarrying. The four other cloned babies 
are expected next year.

Boisselier, 45, is a biochemist associated with the Raelians, a cult that believes life on earth was 
genetically created by visiting extra-terrestrials.

Last February, the Raelians predicted a human clone within the next two years and in April, it said it 
had started work on cloning a terminally ill man.

Clonaid was forced to abandon its US laboratory after the US Food and Drug Administration warned in 
2000 that it would not allow experiments on cloning humans

Boisselier explained Clonaid used the eggs of a woman as well as cells from a donor. One cell was 
selected and put into the woman's egg, which was implanted into the uterus of the woman being cloned.

"The baby has developed very normally and has been followed closely. We are not talking about a 
monster but about a baby desired by her parents," Boisselier said.

The news follows the announcement by an Italian group, led by Dr. Severino Antinori, which said last month a woman was expected to give birth to a cloned boy in January.

Canadian scientists expressed doubt the Raelians, founded by 55-year-old leader Claude Vorilhon, had 
the expertise to deliver a healthy cloned baby.

"I don't see a valid reason to be in this area at this time. I don't think there is a team anywhere that 
could create a healthy baby," Leader said, stressing that cloning of animals had been quite problematic 
in the first phases.

Religion specialists said the Raelian movement was good at generating publicity with its stunts.

"It is not the first time they have announced things like that," said Mike Kropveld, executive director of Montreal-based Info-Cult.

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by Tamara Traubman ("Ha'Aretz Daily," September 11, 2002)

The Raelian Movement believes that aliens first created human beings in Jerusalem. Now this group, who have set up a worldwide human cloning service, is desperate to establish an `embassy' where it all began

Two years ago, a prosperous Israeli businessman was diagnosed with a terminal illness. The disease is atrophying his body so that, day by day, he is losing the ability to perform simple, routine functions. Concluding that a life dependent on others is not worth living, he stopped taking his medication. Fifty-eight years old and childless, he decided, when the end was near, that he wants to leave something of himself behind. He rapidly became obsessed with the idea that this something should be a cloned child - one who is genetically identical to himself. The businessman won't live to raise the child, but he sees his premature death as an unfortunate "mishap" and believes that his genes deserve a second chance.

If this had happened five years ago, the businessman would have had to make do with the usual means wealthy people use to perpetuate their memory - like underwriting a new children's hospital ward or a cultural center bearing his name. Today, on the other hand, with the genome being dubbed a culture hero and called the "book of life," his wish is to perpetuate ... his genes. And given the current enthusiasm for the wonders of biotechnology, with many other people sharing his metaphysical faith in the power of genetics, the opportunity to realize his dream is becoming more realistic.

A like-minded group is the Raelian Movement, a science-oriented religious movement, which espouses cloning as an article of faith. About 18 months ago, the businessman and the Raelians found each other (through the Internet, of course). The consequences of that meeting are bound to lead to a renewed argument over whether or not human beings should ever be cloned and, if so, for what purpose.

The desire to be cloned is not restricted to bio-megalomaniacs; there are also bereaved parents with this desire. They acknowledge that cloning cannot give them exactly the same child over again, and that he will be raised in a different time and in a different environment by people who have been irrevocably changed by their loss. Yet, they yearn to clone a person who will resemble, albeit painfully, the precious one who was lost to them, in the vain hope of bringing him back to life.

E.T.s and Elohim

The businessman in question has invested in Clonaid, a company established by the Raelians. The investment: about $1 million, they say. While it's unlikely that the Raelians will succeed, the fact is that they have about 50 true believers - women prepared to donate their eggs and to serve as surrogate mothers for a cloned fetus.

Cloning thus far has proved to be very inefficient, in that the failures far outnumber the successes: Only two or three of every 100 animal cloning trials result in a live birth. According to Prof. Don Wolf of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, a leading scientist in the field, "when you look at the critical prerequisites for cloning - money, eggs, a surrogate womb, determination and patience - the Raelian group has them all." For these reasons, says Wolf, they have to be taken seriously.

That's not always easily done, especially when listening to the preaching of Rael, the movement's leader - a French-born former race-car enthusiast who favors all-white attire reminiscent of Flash Gordon's. Over the telephone, his voice has a velvet quality as he describes, with a slight accent, how in 1973 he met an alien who landed his flying saucer on a volcano in southern France: "He was about 1.20 meters tall. His eyes were a bit slanted, a little like Asiatics." The alien (who spoke "very articulately, though in a slightly nasal voice") told Rael that life on earth was created by aliens with an advanced knowledge of genetic engineering.

These aliens are "Elohim" (that's right!), a word whose meaning in ancient Hebrew, according to Rael, was "a god who came from the sky." The extraterrestrials took Rael to their planet, he says, where graceful female robots did whatever he wished and gave him "the most unforgettable bath in my life." His experiences on the alien planet persuaded the pleasure-loving Rael that his task was to bring the Elohim's message back to the world.

Susan Palmer, a Canadian sociologist who is studying the Raelians, believes that they number between 20,000 and 30,000 people in 80 different countries, including Israel. The Raelians are not without resources: Prof. Jeffrey Hadden, a University of Virginia sociologist who studies religious movements, estimates that the Raelians have raised $7 million to establish an "embassy" in Jerusalem, where they believe the Elohim began creating human beings. In the movement's Tel Aviv office, there is a fat file containing copies of their requests to, and repeated refusals from, the Israeli authorities in the matter of the embassy.

The Israeli branch of the Raelian movement is headed by Leon Mellul, whose official title is "chief counselor." He says there are 360 Raelians in Israel. They believe in enjoying life; they meditate and they meet once a month at a Tel Aviv hotel. Raelians in Israel are actually not all so interested in cloning, he says, because they argue that while today's technology permits conservation of the genetic material, memories cannot be conserved.

Shattered taboo

On the other hand, Dr. Brigitte Boissellier, a top scientist at Clonaid, makes a very professional impression, although talking with her is very strange. She says she has a laboratory in "one of the countries where cloning is not forbidden," but refuses to name the country. "You understand, I don't want to see new legislation being passed there next month," she says, laughing.

Boissellier has two Ph.D.s, one in physical chemistry from the University of Dijon, the other from the University of Houston (Texas). Before joining the Raelian movement, she was associate head of research at the French chemical company Air Liquide. At Clonaid, she says, she set up a six-member research team of scientists and doctors: two biologists, two biochemists and two physicians - one an expert in the field of in vitro fertilization, the other an obstetrician.

Given all the confusion surrounding the subject, it's a matter of concern that, in many countries, comprehensive legislation to prohibit cloning has not yet taken shape. Attorney Gali Ben-Or of the Ministry of Justice, for instance, says that in the United States, federal research funds may not be used for work related to human cloning, but private companies may still do as they like with their money. And, indeed, last November, the American biotech firm Advanced Cell Technology reported that it had cloned a human embryo. The success was partial, however (the embryo lived only to the stage where it consisted of six cells), and the company stressed that, in any case, it had no intention of allowing the embryo to develop into a baby, and it was to be used for the production of stem cells - but it shattered another taboo.

In Israel, the Knesset passed a so-called "Cloning Law" in 1998 that has temporarily prohibited the use of cloning as a substitute for existing fertility treatments. The prohibition expires in 2004. Meanwhile, the committee that, under the law, was supposed to monitor developments worldwide and submit yearly reports with recommendations has not yet submitted even one report.

The wording of the law implies that there is no intrinsic problem with cloning, merely a "technical" problem because the method isn't fail-safe. One supporter of the method is Prof. Michel Ravel, Israel Prize laureate in medicine and chairman of the Bio-Ethics Advisory Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Cloning, he says, if it's ever made safe, will not harm human dignity. On the contrary, he thinks: If the system can help infertile couples, it could mesh nicely with the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.

Boissellier says that the Clonaid waiting list has thousands of names on it. About half are infertile couples, but there are also many people who want to clone their dead relatives ("some are from Israel; people who lost family members in a war," she reveals) and also some gay couples.

"To clone a child you've lost," she explains matter-of-factly, "we must preserve his cells very quickly. Ideally, within less than 24 hours after death. People send us specially packaged cells by mail, or we go ourselves and collect the cells."

But who, or what, do the parents expect to receive? "They know it's won't be the same person. We discuss this with them," says Boissellier, launching into one of those speeches in which each element by itself sounds logical, but the sum total is completely distorted: "When you're a parent and you have a child, a very specific child with its own DNA, and you aren't able to raise this child to the point where he can enjoy life and leave his mark on the world, you have a choice either to let him go forever, back to dust - or to preserve the DNA, this special DNA, and bring a `late-born' twin to this child into the world, and try to raise the child, see him blossom and turn into someone. That's what these people think."

Unraveling the secret of life

"The genetic revolution and the project to interpret the human genome have changed our thinking, and are perceived as a step toward unraveling the secret of life itself," says Vardit Ravitsky, who is writing her doctoral thesis at Bar-Ilan University on ethics and genetics.

"The idea of `self-perpetuation' via `perpetuation of my DNA' has tremendous symbolic and emotional weight. The notion that, if another human being is born who carries my DNA, then in a certain sense `I' continue to exist and my death from my standpoint is `less final,' is really the latest idea in a long human tradition of battling the finality of our mortality by `leaving our mark': to leave behind offspring whom we've educated, a book we've written, a building we've built, a painting we've painted, some `message.' In this sense, to have my DNA remain after me can be conceived of as one more way to leave behind something of myself. The problem is the ease with which - apparently - people will begin to think, not in terms of `perpetuating myself,' but in terms of `assuring my own immortality.' That's a deterministic conception in the straightforward sense that `my clone will actually be another me' who will live on after me.

"Opponents of cloning argue that cloning encourages our cultural predisposition not to accept death as part of life. In this view, modern medicine has taught us that we can and should battle against death with the help of technology, which can prolong our lives astonishingly, and that cloning is another step in the same direction: that death is a `mishap' that we will soon be able to `overcome.'"

Liz Catalan and others like her feel that cloning technology will fill a certain void in their lives. Catalan sells cruise packages in Miami. At 36, a few years after marrying her husband, Marco, she discovered that her ovaries were no longer producing eggs. Doctors told her that the only way she could become pregnant would be by using donated eggs, but she isn't interested in carrying another woman's child, and prefers the idea of giving birth to her own twin sister.

In an interview with NBC-TV a few weeks ago, Catalan related that she had sent her medical documents to Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, who does in vitro fertilization in Kentucky and who has announced plans to clone a human infant, with a request to be placed on his waiting list.

"How many people who say no - either to cloning as fertility, or to cloning to produce stem cells for research - would change their

minds if they were in my position?" Catalan wonders. "People are still going to do it," she says. "They'll just go to some other country."

Fuzzy family ties

"I see cloning as the prescription for the fundamental loneliness of each person," says Randy Wicker who runs the Internet site for the Human Cloning Foundation, which he established after the announcement was made of the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep, in 1997. "Most people feel very alone and isolated. There's a total lack of communication between generations. With cloning, we'll have families that are much closer." And what about the problems that are liable to crop up in family relations? queries Ravitsky. "The inter-generational boundaries will become fuzzy when it's not clear who's the child of whom, and what the family relationships created as a result of cloning are going to be: A `father' will, in fact, be his child's `identical twin'; a `mother' will give birth to her own `identical twin'; `grandparents' will be the genetic parents of their `grandchildren.' There will be tremendous confusion about family relationships."

In any event, says Wicker, he spends many hours every day answering questions from people who think that cloning is already available and who want to know how to go about arranging it. He explains that cloning is not yet an option for people, and encourages them to try other possibilities at this point - like adoption. Still, he urges them to join in the battle to change the way people feel about human cloning.

"So many things can go wrong in cloning," says Dr. Amir Arav of the Volcani Institute. "Some cloned animals are born larger than normal, others with health flaws, cardiac or respiratory; there are flaws in the DNA, and existing tests clearly cannot reveal them all."

Is Boissellier worried that the defects seen in so many cloned animals may appear in a cloned human infant? "We will follow the development of the fetus very closely," she responds. "A sick child will not be born."

But most scientists are skeptical about their real ability to carry out that promise. Most cloned fetuses never reach maturity, but end their lives during cell reproduction. Are potential surrogate mothers aware that they might have to undergo an abortion if their infants are discovered to have defects? Yes, says Boissellier, and hands the telephone to her daughter, Marina Cocolios, 23, an art student, who was chosen to serve as the first surrogate.

"I think it's so beautiful, I see it as a gift to humanity," says Cocolios. "I always wanted a child, but I never had the time." 

How cloning works

In cloning, a cell is taken from a mature animal and the cell nucleus - where almost all the genetic material is located - is injected into an empty egg, the nucleus of which has been removed. To make the empty egg and the mature nucleus unite to develop a fetus, a process usually initiated by the sperm, a small electrical charge is used, which "vitalizes" the fertilized egg. The Edinburgh researchers who cloned Dolly demonstrated something that had hitherto been considered impossible: that the DNA in the mature cell, which had already fulfilled its specific purpose and matured, could be "tricked" into dividing and behaving as if it were a newly fertilized egg. At the next stage, which isn't particularly complicated, the fetus is implanted in the womb of a surrogate.

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by Paul Shin (AP, July 26, 2002)

SEOUL, South Korea - Health authorities asked state prosecutors Friday to open a criminal investigation into a firm's claim that it successfully implanted a cloned human embryo in a South Korean woman.

The move came after the Ministry of Health and Welfare said it failed to find whether the claim by Clonaid, a U.S.-based religious sect, was true or not.

Kwak Ji-hwa, a spokesman for Clonaid's South Korea office, said this week that its head office made a Korean woman pregnant with a cloned embryo, with help from BioFusion Tech, a firm based in the southeastern city of Daegu.

But in telephone interviews with government investigators and journalists, Kwak refused to provide details about the surrogate South Korean mother, his company or its location in the United States and South Korea.

"Everything remains under the veil, so we have had to ask the prosecution to intervene," said Lee Jae-yong, a health ministry director who handles medical policy matters.

Lee said South Korea has no law banning human cloning. The prosecution probe, he said, will focus on whether the companies violated existing laws that ban unlicensed, unethical medical activities or practices.

Lee said BioFusion denied conducting any experiments for human cloning, although it acknowledged that it had carried out tests on a newly developed cell fusion device with animal cells.

Alarmed by the controversy, South Korea said Friday it will accelerate efforts to enact its first law against human cloning.

"Whether the claim is true or not, it has become more imperative that we enact such a law at the earliest possible date," said Kim So-hui, another official at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Kim's ministry and the Ministry of Science and Technology have drafted separate legislation that would ban cloning of humans and limit stem cell research. The two bills are being combined into one for approval by the National Assembly.

Officials said the unified bill will call for a prison term of up to 10 years for those who attempt or help to clone humans. It will also require the establishment of a presidential ethics committee with the power to set boundaries on embryonic and stem cell research.

Research on embryonic stem cells could revolutionize the treatment of diseases such as cancer and Parkinson's disease. But the research is controversial because embryos must be destroyed to recover the stem cells.

According to its Web site, www.clonaid.com , Clonaid was founded in 1997 by the Raelian Movement, a sect that believes life on earth was created by clones of extraterrestrials.

The Raelian Movement claims a membership of 55,000 worldwide. It was not known how many followers it has in South Korea.

Most cloning experts are opposed to cloning for reproductive purposes, citing numerous birth defects and other serious problems affecting cloned animals.

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Cult Head Predicts Human Clone in Two Years

LONDON (Reuters, Feb. 15, 2002) - The Canadian leader of a cult which believes in 

UFOs predicted on Thursday a human clone would be born within two years, despite 

the best efforts of the U.S. government to block such Frankenstein-style activities. 

Fifty five-year-old former sports reporter Claud Vorilhon, now known as cult chief Rael, 

has said a program by the human cloning company he founded was back on track to clone a 

person after pressure from the U.S. government stopped a first attempt last year. 

Rael said the company, Clonaid, was still in the process of recreating a terminally-ill 

man at a secret location despite abandoning its U.S. laboratory in the wake of a March 

warning from the United States Food and Drug Administration that it would not allow experiments 

on cloning humans. 

"The process is going well," Rael told journalists. "A baby will be born 12 to 24 months 

from now." 
Scientists have cloned a number of animals, including Dolly the sheep, the world's first 

cloned mammal, and more recently a pet cat from Texas called "Cc". 

But ethical reservations have so far kept the reality of human cloning out of mainstream 

science and last year the United States . 

The emergence of medical complications with Dolly, who has developed premature arthritis, 

has also cast doubt over the safety of dabbling in what is normally seen as the sole preserve 

of God or Mother Nature. 

Dressed in white and with his hair swept up in a small knot, Rael said fears of the human 

cloning producing "a monster" or "Frankenstein" were unfounded because faulty cells would be 

discarded in the Clonaid process. 

"My mission is to prepare human beings for future technology," said the Raelian leader, 

a self-confessed lover of the Internet and video games who was in London to promote his 

new book. 

"Life expectancy is now 90 years, at the beginning of the century is was 40 years...once we 

have applied this technology human beings will soon live at 700 years," he said. 

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U.S. cloning advance shocks world

(CNN, November 27, 2001)

LONDON, England -- Political and religious leaders around the world have condemned the latest breakthrough in cloning research in which a U.S. company said it had cloned a human embryo for the first time.

The private U.S. research company -- Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), based in Worcester, Massachusetts -- said on Sunday it had cloned embryos by removing the DNA from human egg cells.

The DNA from an adult human body cell was then implanted into the egg cell, which was then stimulated to grow into a six-cell embryo.

How it was done 

The technique used by Advanced Cell Technology scientists is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also referred to as human therapeutic cloning.

A cell from a patient's body is combined with an egg cell that has had its DNA removed. This reprograms the body cell's DNA back to an embryonic state, and stem cells identical to the patient's are produced. Stem cells can form any cell or tissue in the human body.

Of eight eggs, two divided to form early embryos composed of four cells. One progressed to a six-cell stage before it stopped dividing. This breakthrough occurred October 13, 2001.

Source: Advanced Cell Technology Inc.     

British genetics expert Dr. Patrick Dixon told the UK's Independent Television News: "The news is hugely significant because it shows that it's possible to take a cell from an adult, combine it with an egg and create an identical cloned embryo. If you implant it, you'll get a cloned baby."

"There are enormous ethical questions raised by this technology.

"Over 170 nations of the world have no legislation whatsoever preventing the birth of human clones. Sunday's announcement draws that step ever closer.

"We need global agreement and we need it urgently, or we will see clones born in many countries of the world."

The breakthrough was condemned by President George W. Bush.

"The president is 100 percent opposed to any cloning of human embryos," a White House aide told CNN.

The U.S. Congress has moved to outlaw all human cloning. A proposed new law is under consideration by the Senate.

The Vatican said the scientists had tampered with human life.

"Notwithstanding the humanistic intents... this calls for a calm but resolute appraisal which shows the moral gravity of this project and calls for unequivocal condemnation," the Vatican said in a statement.

"Cloning violates the dignity and the identity of human life," the influential Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone told Italy's Corriere della Sera daily.

Bertone later told Italian state television: "Therapeutic aims are excellent, they are praiseworthy. However, it is the means used that raise the questions."

Raymond Flynn, president of the National Catholic Alliance and a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, said in a statement: "Some may call it a medical breakthrough. I believe it is a moral breakdown."

"Human reproduction is now in the hands of men, when it rightfully belongs in the hands of God," Flynn said.

Evelyn Gebhardt, a member of the European Parliament from Germany and coordinator for the Temporary Committtee on Human Genetics for the EP told CNN that while all EU members have signed the Charter on Fundamental Rights, which bans human cloning for reproductive purposes, different countries within the EU have different levels of legislation regarding cloning and embryo research.

"Patchwork is a good word. I think it is necessary to have common legislation, but I am not sure if it will be able to make this common legislation in the European Union because traditions and culture which exist in our countries are very different," Gebhardt said.

"So in Germany, we don't allow any of these things, it is aboslutely illegal. In other countries it is allowed, and there are the traditions, the cultures, which are behind that.

"The only thing we can do on the European level is that we define which research we will finance on the European level, and we did make decision in the last two weeks where we did say it can be financed in cases where it is the ethical committees that will allow that and only where it is not prohibited.

"And that is what we did in the European Union. I think the patchwork will be a patchwork for a long time."

In London emergency legislation banning human cloning was cleared the House of Lords Monday, after peers warned the practice was "unsafe and unethical."

The Human Reproductive Cloning Bill, tabled in the House of Lords last week, allows for a ban on cloned embryos being implanted into wombs but does not ban therapeutic cloning using cell nuclear replacement for research -- the technique used by the American firm and to produce Dolly the sheep.

Dr. Ian Wilmut, who led the team which produced the Dolly the sheep clone at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, told the UK Press Association the ACT report was a "very preliminary observation."

"It's almost impossible to know how far off they could be (from creating usable stem cells) but there's nothing in this report to suggest that the technique could be made to work immediately."

Australian Senator Brian Harradine accused ACT of "tinkering with the very essence of human life."

"Urgent action is needed to ban cloning of human embryos for any purpose and to cut off funding for any scientist or company involved," Harradine said in a statement.

A parliamentary committee recommended last month that Australia should ban all cloning to produce humans and creating embryos for experimentation but favoured using surplus human embryos from fertility programmes for research.

French bioethics specialist and President of the Liberal Democratic party Jean-Francois Mattei said on Monday: "It is extremely serious. In nine months we will be in a position to have a cloned baby."

In India, Reliance Life Sciences, one of two Indian firms whose stem cell work is eligible for U.S. funding, said the development "was inevitable."

"ACT's success could drive people into panic mode because of the impression that reproductive cloning is around the corner, but the fact is that if we use cloning for therapeutic purposes, this is a major advance," said Firuza Parikh, the company's founder and director.

_____________________________________________

Canadian cult says it was first to clone embryos

By Robert Melnbardis (Nov. 26, 2001)

MONTREAL (Reuters) - A U.S. company's claim to have cloned a human embryo is 

simply a case of "been there, done that" for a Canadian UFO cult linked to a 

secretive cloning company, the movement's leader said on Monday. 
Claude Vorilhon, the 54-year-old former sports writer now known as Rael who 

founded a religious movement based on the premise that life on earth was 

genetically created by visiting extra-terrestrials, said on Monday he welcomed 

the claim by Advanced Cell Technology Inc. that it had cloned a human embryo. 
"Very happy, and a bit amused because we did that some time ago," Rael told Reuters. 
Worcester, Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology caused a uproar on Sunday 

when it announced it had cloned a human embryo as part of its research to perfect a 

technique in which embryos could be used as a source of valuable stem cells to treat 

diseases. 
	Researchers at the company said they had grown several embryos using eggs from several 

women and the DNA from another woman's cumulous cells, those found in the ovaries that 

nourish the eggs. One of the embryos survived long enough to divide into six cells. 
While some experts questioned the scientific veracity of the company's claim, others 

observers, from U.S. President George Bush to the Vatican and women's rights groups, 

condemned the research. 
	Not so for the Quebec-based Raelians, who openly support Clonaid, a company headed by cult 

member Brigitte Boisselier, a 44-year-old French biochemist determined to produced the 

world's first cloned baby. That is why Clonaid, which purports to have established a new 

research laboratory in an undisclosed country, will not be making announcements on its 

progress in the project, Rael said. 
	"The first communique that Clonaid will make will be to announce the birth of the baby, 

but not for such a small thing," he said, referring to Advanced Cell Technology's announcement. 
Clonaid was forced to abandon its U.S. laboratory after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 

warned in March that it would not allow experiments on cloning humans. But Rael said the 

research continues at Clonaid. 
	"They set up a laboratory in another country where it is not prohibited and things are 

going forward," Rael said. 
	Clonaid already has more than 3,000 individuals seeking to clone a person, and 55 women, 

all "Raelians," who are prepared to carry the cloned embryos to term, Rael said. 
"Of course, Clonaid's goal is not to make a monster or a handicapped child, which would 

be terrible. The first child must be perfect, let's say in a health that is recognized 

as perfect," he said. 
	Rael added that opponents are actually more worried that Clonaid's first cloned baby 

would be "beautiful, perfect and in good health." 
	In an even more science-fiction twist, Clonaid eventually would like to clone fully 

grown individuals in a sort of "accelerated-growth process" where memories and personality 

could be "downloaded" to the clone from the donor, Rael said. 
"That is what interests us -- it is to be able to live eternally through several 

bodies," he said. 
	Although Clonaid and the Raelians want to produce the world's first cloned person, 

they also support the prospect of using cloned embryos to harvest stem cells to combat 

a range of diseases including cancer, he added. 
				 

_____________________________________________

Hidden No More
Discovering the Location of a Secret Human Cloning Lab

("ABC News," August 15, 2001)

Aug. 15 - For months, French biochemist Brigitte Boisselier has been touting 
a lab hidden in the United States that was already conducting experiments in 
human cloning.  
 

But the mystery didn't last for very long. Boisselier inadvertently tipped 
her hand when she testified before the National Academy of Sciences in 
Washington D.C. last week on why human cloning should be allowed.
"She gave many clues in that testimony," says Joe Lauria, a U.S. 
correspondent with the Sunday Times of London who pressed to find the lab's 
location for the British paper. 

At the hearing, Boisselier said a father had written a letter asking her to 
clone his 10-month-old son who died during surgery to repair a defective 
heart.

Boisselier, a member of a cult called The Raelian Movement that proposes 
humans are the cloned creations of advanced extraterrestrials, never named 
the father or the location of the lab. But she did hint that her letter 
writer was a local legislator somewhere in the United States.

Archive Provides the Missing Link

Researching old news archives, Lauria told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America 
today that he discovered a former West Virginia state legislator and 
congressional candidate had lost his infant son in circumstances similar to 
Boisselier's undisclosed letter writer. That 1999 news article in a 
Charleston, W.Va., paper identified the local legislator as Mark Hunt.

Lauria further discovered in a Charleston phone directory a listing for 
Bioserv, Inc.Ña company Boisselier claimed to have started with the letter 
writer. A call to the company was answered by a building manger who confirmed 
that Mark Hunt paid the rent on the building.

"It was spooky," says Lauria about discovering the connection and the lab's 
location. "I realized I was the only person in Charleston, West Virginia Ñ 
other than Mr. Hunt and his law partner Ñ who knew what was going on."

Lab Closed, But Not the Research

Lauria says that Bioserv's "really dilapidated, awfully kept building" was 
actually an old high school. The lab itself "didn't look like much more than 
a high school chemistry lab," he says. "But my reading and research showed 
that you don't need that much sophisticated equipment to do [human cloning 
experiments]," he says.

Since publishing the findings in the Sunday Times of London on Aug. 5, Lauria 
says, Hunt admitted to his financial backing of Bioserv, which has no 
connections to two other similarly named local companies. 

Lauria also told Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos that Hunt 
has since severed his relationship with Biosselier and has shut down the lab. 

However, "I do know he wants to continue to clone his son," says Lauria. "He 
will go elsewhere, maybe out of the country if it becomes against the law in 
the United States." 

"He wants his son back," says Lauria. "Or at least a replica." 

 _____________________________________________

CLONED IN THE USA: ATTEMPT TO CLONE HUMAN BEING IN 

SECRET WEST VIRGINIA LAB REVEALED

by Joe Lauria  ("London Times," August12, 2001)

It was a perfect place to hide their scheme: an old classroom in a squalid 
former high school tucked away in the hills of rural West Virginia.

The town of Nitro's police station is in the rundown 1950s-era building whose 
brown bricks are blackened with soot. Bingo games are played in another room. 

On the second floor is a day-care centre and plumbing and roofing companies. 
But down a dark corridor lined with trash and broken students' lockers is 
Room 201. Inside is a pristine laboratory, fitted with sophisticated 
equipment. Green posters of human cells adorn the walls. A blue incubator 
stands in the back. It looks like an ordinary lab. 

But in this room, scientists working for a UFO cult and a local politician 
were secretly trying to clone a human being. They were attempting to bring 
back to life Andrew, a 10-month old baby boy who died after heart surgery in 
September 1999. He was the son of Mark and Tracy Hunt, a wealthy and 
well-connected political family in Charleston. 

Mark Hunt, 41, had been a member of the West Virginia House for five years 
and declared himself a candidate in the November 2000 election for the U.S. 
House of Representatives. He dropped out of that race, after spending 
$200,000 of his own money, and ran instead for the West Virginia State 
Senate. He lost. Hunt is now practising law, but maintains a Hunt for 
Congress office in Charleston. 

After Andrew died, his parents froze some of his cells. Unable to cope with 
their grief, the Hunts began searching for a way to bring him back to life. 
Hunt says he travelled widely meeting scientists. He finally encountered on 
the Internet the one he was convinced would help him. He made a deal with 
French biochemist Brigitte Boisselier. 

With doctorates from France and Texas, Boisselier, 44, was teaching at 
Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse. In 1993, she joined the 
Quebec-based Raelian cult. 

Today, she is a bishop in the cult, which believes the human race originated 
as clones of an advanced alien species. Its leader, French racing car driver 
and journalist Claude Vorilhon, who calls himself Rael, claims he learned 
this when he boarded a UFO in France in 1973.

Rael has set up headquarters at a science fiction theme park called UFO Land 
outside Montreal. 

The Raelian movement says it has 50,000 members worldwide, who, according to 
its Web site, must pay 13 per cent of their yearly income to the cult and 
take part in unusual sexual practices -- such as being made to mate with 
someone of the same sex to prove one's sexual orientation. 

Boisselier became science director of Rael's company, Clonaid, whose aim is 
to charge $200,000 to clone any person who can pay. She claims hundreds of 
infertile couples, homosexuals and others have asked her to clone them. 

Around August 2000, nearly a year after Andrew's death, Boisselier and Hunt 
went into a cloning business of their own. 

Hunt says he invested $500,000 to set up a secret, new company called Bioserv 
Inc., which they did not register with the West Virginia authorities. Hunt 
chose Nitro, an obscure town named after nitroglycerine since it was founded 
during the Second World War to make explosives. 

Hunt rented the old classroom for $320 a month and began filling it with the 
equipment needed to create a new Andrew. Boisselier hired three scientists, 
all American-trained -- a geneticist, a biochemist and an ob-gyn affiliated 
with an in-vitro fertilization clinic -- to carry out the work. 

Their method was similar to Dr. Ian Wilmut's, the creator of Dolly the sheep, 
the world's first clone in 1996. A human egg's genetic information is 
stripped away and the nucleus from a cell of the person to be cloned, in this 
case baby Andrew, would be fused by electricity into the empty egg. The 
embryo is then implanted in a surrogate mother. 

Boisselier says 50 women came forward to bear the Andrew clone, including her 
own 22-year-old daughter, Marina Cocolios. 

All the women may have been needed since there were more than 200 attempts to 
bring Dolly to term, all but one of the embryos miscarrying or born horribly 
deformed -- a principal argument of opponents of human cloning. But 
Boisselier said technology would allow her scientists to detect abnormalities 
in time to abort a fetus gone wrong. 

Boisselier could not contain herself. She began to give numerous media 
interviews, saying a cloned child would be born by the end of 2001. And she 
began dropping hints. 

Last March, she was called to testify before a U.S. House subcommittee, which 
was gathering evidence for a bill that would outlaw human cloning. Before 
Congress, she released an anonymous letter she said was from the father who 
had lost a 10-month old son and wanted him cloned. 

"I am a successful attorney, a former State Legislator, a current elected 
official, a husband, a son, a brother, but most importantly, I am a father," 
Hunt wrote. "We didn't know what to do and I couldn't accept that it was over 
for our child, and for the first time in human history I/we didn't accept 
death as the end. Not since our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, spoke to 
Lazarus and told him to 'come forth' from the grave has a human being able to 
bridge the great gulf of death. 

"I hoped and prayed that my son would be the first; I decided then and there 
that I would never give up on my child. I would never stop until I could give 
his DNA -- his genetic makeup a chance. I knew that we only had one chance; 
human cloning. To create a healthy duplicate, a twin of our son. I set out to 
make it happen." 

With no law against human cloning, the Food and Drug Administration took 
notice. Agents visited Boisselier at Hamilton College. They then arranged a 
visit to the lab at Nitro and struck a deal with her and Hunt last spring. 

They would not reveal the name of the father or the lab's location in return 
for their agreement to cease work on the experiment. Boisselier and Hunt 
agreed until the legal picture was clear. 

But Boisselier gave media interviews again, saying she would not stop the 
work. That is when Hunt said he began to sour on her, calling her a "press 
hog" who was getting him in trouble with the FDA. He says he changed the lock 
on the lab door to prevent further experiments. 

A federal grand jury was then convened in Syracuse to gather evidence toward 
a possible indictment against Boisselier on the grounds her cloning 
activities had violated U.S. drug laws, which the FDA oversees, a U.S. 
government source said. An FDA spokeswoman refused to discuss the case. 

Boisselier said in Las Vegas, where she lives, that she wants to sue the FDA 
to challenge its authority to ban human cloning. 

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban all human cloning. 
President George W. Bush said he would sign the legislation if the Senate 
passes a similar measure. 

Boisselier said she doesn't intend to break the law and will move the project 
abroad if necessary. She said her company, Clonaid, has a lab outside the 
U.S., but refused to say where. A Web site edited by Boisselier said in March 
1999 that Clonaid opened an office in South Korea and was seeking a 
partnership with scientists there. It has a second Web site registered in 
Seoul. 

As Hunt's name and the lab's location were revealed, he admitted his role in 
the cloning attempt. He said he was severing ties with Boisselier and would 
abandon the project to bring back Andrew, adding that the work had only got 
as far as testing the viability of the child's DNA. 

Boisselier said in a news release she had 2,000 people waiting to take Hunt's 
place and would open a new lab elsewhere in the U.S. 

Hunt says he hasn't given up his belief in raising the dead through cloning. 

 _____________________________________________

Pursuit of human clones raises furore in US

by Clive Cookson ("Financial Times," August 9 2001) 

The biggest scientific furore so far about human cloning has broken out in 
Washington, with a clash between a small group of researchers who are 
determined to create cloned babies and a larger number who say the procedure 
is extremely risky. 
Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility specialist, and Panayiotis Zavos, a 
US colleague, told a meeting organised by the National Academy of Sciences 
that they could screen out abnormal embryos. They plan to start the process 
later this year in an unspecified country where human cloning is legal. 

Brigitte Boisselier, a biochemist associated with the Raelian cult, is 
working on a separate human cloning project. 

Mainstream scientists denounced both projects. Leading the attack was Rudolf 
Jaenisch, an animal cloning pioneer at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, who said: "At present there is no way to predict whether a given 
clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual." 

The procedure that produced Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, in 
Scotland in 1997 has also succeeded with cattle, pigs, mice and other species 
- but at a huge cost in abnormal embryos that were spontaneously aborted or 
died soon after birth. 

Dr Zavos and Dr Antinori said 1,500 couples, mainly in the US and Italy, had 
volunteered to take part in their cloning project because infertility would 
otherwise prevent them having children. The doctors would choose 200 of them 
for the first stage of the project. 

The Food and Drug Administration has prohibited human cloning in the US, in 
the absence of federal legislation to ban it. Legislation to ban human 
cloning has been passed in several countries including the UK and Italy. In 
the US a proposed legislative ban on reproductive cloning has been caught up 
in a controversy about therapeutic cloning - cloning embryos as a source of 
stem cells for research rather than to produce babies.

 _____________________________________________

Cloning clash
Rejecting pleas for caution, a group that says space aliens seeded Earth 
tells a key science panel it will create human copies

by Edward Epstein ("San Fransico Chronicle, August 8, 2001)

The august National Academy of Sciences came face to face yesterday with the 
earthly representatives of extraterrestrials who want to clone human beings. 
But in a sign of how fast science fiction is becoming fact, no one was 
laughing. 

Human cloning is now probably just a matter of time, and an academy panel 
heard yesterday from three renegade scientists vying to be the first to do 
it. The mainstream scientists, most of whom are involved in stem cell 
research aimed at treating a variety of diseases, urged caution, warning that 
cloned babies could be born with horrible birth defects. 

But the advocates of cloning human babies for those who want to create their 
own genetic copies were unimpressed. 

"If you want to have a baby using your own genes, it's your right," said 
Brigitte Boisselier, director of Clonaid, a Bahamas group working toward 
cloning humans. 

Clonaid is associated with the Raelian Revolution, a group that says life on 
Earth was originally created by extraterrestrials through cloning. The 
movement also claims that these space creatures have delivered messages to 
Rael, the alias for a French ex-race car driver who founded the movement, and 
that Jesus Christ was resurrected through an advanced cloning technique. 

Boisselier is a bishop in the group, which claims 84,000 members worldwide. 

COMING TO A HEAD
As exotic as Boisselier's resume may be, her invitation to join the academy's 
panel on the scientific and medical aspects of human cloning shows how all 
areas of cloning research are generating intense public attention. 

The House of Representatives voted last week to outlaw all cloning and stem 
cell research, whether to produce a baby or for medical research. Most of 
those on the national academy panel, which is chaired by Professor Irving 
Weissman of Stanford University, are involved in therapeutic stem cell 
research. 

By the end of September, the panel is due to produce a report that could be 
influential as the Senate takes up the House-passed measure to ban all 
cloning research. 

Within the next few weeks, President Bush will decide whether to allow the 
use of federal funds in embryonic stem cell research, including research that 
does not involve cloning. 

To judge from the rough reception Boisselier and two other advocates of human 
cloning received yesterday, the mainstream scientists fear that all the talk 
of test tube babies could endanger important research into treating a host of 
ailments. 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Ian Wilmut, the Scottish biologist who in 1997 cloned the first mammal, Dolly 
the sheep, warned of unanticipated genetic defects in cloned babies, along 
with miscarriages and the need for late-term abortions of deformed fetuses. 

His lab recently saw the birth of a lamb that seemed initially to thrive, 
showing a strong appetite. But the animal continually hyperventilated, a 
problem for which veterinarians could find no cause or cure. After 12 days, 
the lamb was put to sleep. A postmortem showed genetic defects to the lungs. 

"One question people who propose to produce human clones should consider is 
how they would handle a case like this," Wilmut said. "Who will be 
responsible for the baby?" 

Even before Wilmut spoke, Boisselier responded to the fears he raised. 

"Do I have any concern about harm to the mother or child? I do not," she 
said. "I'm a very responsible scientist, and I feel comfortable with the 
knowledge we have accumulated. 

"We should not be hostages of public fears. On the contrary, we should be 
fighting for research to be conducted at the best places. There are hundreds 
of scientists willing to do (research), but they're afraid." 

Boisselier and two others, Panayiotis Michael Zavos of the Andrology 
Institute of America in Kentucky and Dr. Severino Antinori of the University 
of Rome, said abnormal embryos created during cloning could be screened out. 

"There is every reason to believe that if we continue to refine the 
technology, we will get there," said Zavos. 

Zavos and Antinori also said that cloning would be appropriate for only a 
small number of cases of infertility. 

SIDESHOW COULD SLOW RESEARCH
Some scientists say infertility is hardly sufficient reason to permit the 
cloning of human beings. 

"It's not a wise idea at all," said Alan Trounson of the Monash Institute in 
Australia. "I've been very critical scientifically of them proceeding. Birth 
defects create tremendous difficulties for families and for the child." 

He also said the sideshow over cloning newborns could overshadow the more 
fundamental debate over stem cell research into diseases and whether the U.S. 
government should ban that work. 

"If you take out the American scientists, you take out the best scientists in 
the world . . ." Trounson said. "It's a public health issue. They need to 
stay in." 

Antinori and Boisselier have had run-ins with authorities over their plans to 
clone humans. Boisselier's research was originally done in West Virginia. 

Antinori, who says he wants to clone a human embryo this year, faces 
discipline by Italian medical authorities. He works with Zavos and has said 
that 1,300 people in Kentucky are interested in participating in his cloning 
experiments. 

_____________________________________________

Scientists defend plans to clone human beings
"It will be done,"  Advocate Asserts 

by Aaron Zitner  ("Los Angeles Times," August 8, 2001) 

WASHINGTON -- As details of their work remained murky, two research teams 
Tuesday defended their plans to clone human beings despite growing concerns 
that the practice would lead to deformed or unhealthy babies.

``I believe there is enough information today to proceed in human cloning. . 
. . It will be done. I am doing it,'' said Brigitte Boisselier, director of 
Clonaid, which claims to be the world's first human-cloning company.

A second team, led by an Italian fertility doctor and a Kentucky researcher, 
gave mixed signals on its work. One team leader said there was no timetable 
to carry out cloning, while another said the work could begin next month and 
the first cloned child born late next year.

Both teams say they want to use cloning, the process that creates a genetic 
twin of a living thing, to help women who cannot otherwise give birth. 
Boisselier is affiliated with a small religious group that also sees cloning 
as a tool to achieve eternal life.

The comments came during cloning forum at the National Academy of Sciences, 
which advises the federal government on scientific matters. 

Both research teams are working in secret, and there is no way to assess the 
claims that they have sufficient funding or expertise. Nor has either team 
said where it would conduct human cloning, which is illegal in much of Europe 
and would need FDA approval in the United States.

Pronouncements from the two teams have drawn worldwide attention, with news 
camera crews Tuesday pursuing the cloning advocates even into the bathrooms. 
The U.S. House voted last week to criminalize human cloning, a measure that 
President Bush has said he would sign into law if approved by the Senate.

The two teams also came in for criticism from some of the world's top 
scientists, who told a National Academy panel that human cloning cannot be 
done safely. The panel, which has no regulatory powers, plans to issue a 
report by October on cloning science and on whether a moratorium on human 
cloning is warranted.

Scientists told the panel that cloning causes birth defects and unexplained 
deaths in animals. ``At present there is no way to predict whether a given 
clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual,'' said Rudolf 
Jaenisch, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cloning is a technique for producing an organism that has the same genes as 
its parent.

In mammals, it entails taking DNA from an adult animal and inserting it into 
an egg cell from another animal. The egg then divides into an embryo. The 
embryo is then transferred to a surrogate mother and grown to term. 

Scientists clashed several times with the cloning advocates during panel 
discussions. 

When Boisselier said she had developed a way to test the health of 10 genes 
in cloned non-human embryos, Alan Trounson, an Australian fertility pioneer, 
called the claim ``ludicrous'' and said such tests had not been developed.

Panayiotis Zavos, the Kentucky researcher leading one of the cloning teams, 
said a three-decade history of human fertility research would lead to better 
results with people than with animals. 

Clonaid was founded in 1997 by the Raelian Movement, an obscure religious 
group based in Switzerland and Canada. The group says it believes that 
scientists from another planet created humanity by manipulating DNA, and that 
some humans will achieve eternal life through cloning. 

Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion and until recently was a 
visiting professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

The Italian fertility specialist, Dr. Severino Antinori, said he had no 
schedule for producing cloned children.

But his partner, Zavos, said his team might try to begin producing cloned 
human embryos within 30 days at an undisclosed location, with births 
scheduled for 2002.

_____________________________________________

A Rabbi from the Raelian Branch of Judaism Appointed Grand Rabbi of Israel

NEW YORK, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- 

The following was released today by the 
Raelian Religion:  

Rael, the messenger of the Elohim, has just appointed Leon Mellul, who had 
been designated for nine years as rabbi in the Raelian branch of Judaism, 
Grand Rabbi of Israel. 

Let's remember that on December 13th, 1973, beings from outer space named 
Elohim met with a young French reporter whom they named Rael.  Elohim is a 
plural word in Hebrew meaning "those who came from the sky."  These beings 
arrived on our planet over 25,000 years ago and, thanks to their perfect 
mastering of genetic engineering, created all life on earth, be it plant or 
animal and then proceeded to finally create Man in their image and in their 
resemblance, thanks to deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) as written in Genesis 
1-26. 

Rael is the last messenger from the Elohim.  Many other messengers also have 
been contacted and sent by Elohim.  Amongst the most important are Moses, 
Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. 

Since 1945, we have entered the age of the revelation, thanks to the progress 
of science and cloning.  Today we can better understand our origins instead 
of believing blindly ... 

Elohim have asked their last messenger, Rael, to spread their messages on the 
whole planet earth and to build them an embassy, preferably near Jerusalem, 
to welcome them.  Let's remember that the Jewish people are direct 
descendants of the Elohim who had intimate rapports with daughters of men, as 
is also written in Genesis. 

Leon Mellul immigrated in Israel almost three years ago where the Raelian 
branch of Judaism is becoming bigger and bigger with many hundreds of 
Raelians.  This deeply disturbs the Religious Establishment, who is 
confronted with an important problem, as the Raelians prove with their 
conferences with citations from the Tenaha (Hebrew Bible) that our Creators 
are extraterrestrial. 

_____________________________________________

Raelian sect-Lawyer severs ties with cloning group "Lawyer severs ties with cloning group

by James A. Haught ("Sunday Gazette," August 5, 2001) 

Charleston lawyer Mark Hunt said Saturday he has halted his sponsorship of a French scientist who installed a high-tech laboratory in the former Nitro High School in an attempt to clone an identical twin of Hunt's dead child. Hunt, a former legislator, said he lost confidence in Dr. Brigitte Boisselier recently because she became "a press hog," giving many international news interviews on behalf of the cloning project, and on behalf of the Raelian religion. Raelians contend that space aliens called Elohim created all life on Earth, including humans, through genetic experimentation. The sect was founded by a French race car driver who changed his name to Rael, started a UFO theme park in Canada, and claims 50,000 followers in 85 countries. Because of his race driving, Rael calls himself "the world's fastest prophet." Dr. Boisselier - who holds doctorates in chemistry from the University of Dijon, France, and the University of Houston - is listed as a bishop of his church. Together, they founded Clonaid, which advertises that it is "the first company offering to clone human beings." Hunt, who is vacationing in California with his wife and new baby, said in a telephone interview Saturday that he entered the project with Clonaid because he and his wife were traumatized by the loss of their 10-month-old son, who died from heart defects two years ago. "For parents, nothing can be worse," he said. "It was devastating. We cried. We prayed. ... You can't imagine the absolute misery. It's more than depression - it's physical pain. ... "We decided, for the first time in human history, since Jesus raised Lazarus, to transcend the great gulf of death and bring our baby home - to create an identical twin of Andrew." Hunt said he and his wife realize that a clone wouldn't restore their son's life, but a duplicate child would be "some solace." He said they visited scientists in several states, learning about genetic engineering and stem cell research. But the only group prepared to attempt a human clone from cells of a deceased person was Clonaid, he said. Hunt called the undertaking "a great adventure" and said he isn't ashamed of seeking to duplicate life, "but we kept it secret because press coverage would have jeopardized it." He leased the science lab in Nitro's old high school and bought advanced equipment for Dr. Boisselier and her colleagues to use. In some recent news interviews, the French woman said her cloning project was funded by a "$1 million investment from an American couple who lost their 10-month-old baby." However, Hunt said Saturday that he invested less than $500,000. Workers in the Nitro lab sought to "determine the viability" of the dead child's DNA, Hunt said, and also fertilized cow eggs in laboratory dishes. Agents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration came to Hunt, alarmed by reports that a human clone was being attempted in Nitro. A federal grand jury in Syracuse, N.Y., was exploring a case designed to determine whether the FDA has jurisdiction over cloning. Hunt said he promised the federal officials that no human cloning would occur in Nitro until the legality question was resolved. But Dr. Boisselier gave another TV interview saying a cloned baby would be achieved within six weeks, Hunt said, and the FDA asked if he had misled the U.S. agency. So he closed the Nitro laboratory and changed its locks. All this occurred, Hunt said, before the U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to ban human cloning. The lawyer said he decided to disclose the Nitro experiment because a reporter from the London Times came to Charleston last week and approached his relatives about it. "He went to Nitro and told people that dangerous work was going on there, and that someone might bomb the building." So Hunt felt it was best to make a public statement. He said he and his wife will continue to support cloning and stem cell research in America, because they see no ethical problems with it, and feel it may bring great benefits to humanity. In cloning, scientists extract a creature's DNA, bearing its entire genetic code from the nucleus of a cell. The DNA is substituted for the DNA in a fertilized egg. The egg is implanted in a womb, where it grows through normal gestation into an exact replica of the original creature. Dr. Boisselier said several young Raelian women had volunteered to become pregnant with the egg that would create the first human clone. Hunt was elected to the state House of Delegates in 1994, 1996 and 1998. Last year, he defeated former Sheriff Art Ashley for the Democratic nomination to state Senate, but lost in the fall to Sen. Vic Sprouse, R-Kanawha. Hunt spent about $200,000 of his own funds in the Senate races.

_____________________________________________

Cult intent on cloning first human
The Raelians' belief that they are on the verge of improving mankind's lot 
is about to be tested 

by Micheal Ellison ("Daily Mail & Guardian," July 31, 2001)

With the president of the United States, his health secretary, the Food and 
Drug Administration, anti-abortionists and feminists joined against her, 
Brigitte Boisselier needs a little faith.

A member of the Raelians, a cult that holds that life on Earth was 
genetically engineered by visitors travelling in UFOs, the scientist is about 
to have her belief that she is on the verge of improving mankind's lot tested 
in Congress.

The lower house is expected to consider a Bill that would impose a 10-year 
jail sentence and a $1-million fine on anyone who practises human cloning.

Boisselier is the scientific director of Clonaid and says her team will 
produce the first human clone soon.

"Humanity will benefit," she says. "This is good for infertile couples who 
have serious problems and for people who want to have a baby and don't want 
to mix their genes, people who prefer to clone themselves. Even if you 
prohibit it, there will always be a place where it can be done."

Boisselier will not say when she expects her team of four doctors and a 
technician to achieve their goal, nor will she disclose the locations of 
Clonaid's two laboratories, other than that one is in the United States and 
the other abroad.

Clonaid was set up by the cult four years ago. Its work is in part funded by 
$500 000 from an anonymous couple who want the world's first cloned child, a 
twin of their dead 10-month-old son.

Congress has been told that President George W Bush and the Secretary of 
Health, Tommy Thompson, oppose human cloning. The Food and Drug 
Administration says that human cloning must have its approval, which it will 
not give  a decision Boisselier plans to challenge in the courts. 
Anti-abortionists say that creating clones is immoral. Feminists say that the 
procedure requires women to take possibly damaging drugs to induce egg 
production.

Clonaid's credibility, in scientific terms at least, is not doubted, partly 
because it claims to have 55 women ready to act as surrogate mothers: 
essential because of the high failure rate.

Opponents say that animal cloning has worked in only 3% to 5% of cases, and 
reject the idea of designer babies on ethical grounds. Human reproductive 
cloning is banned in at least 19 countries.

"Do you realise why people from Harvard are marrying each other?" says 
Boisselier "They want babies who will go to Harvard. Even if it's 
unconscious, we're choosing a child by choosing a partner. We don't want to 
have a baby that's an idiot. We're using scientists today to achieve what 
people have been trying to achieve for centuries. I want the children of the 
future to be happy."

Boisselier says that thousands of people have contacted her for reproduction 
by cloning. 

Then there are those who have been in touch for other reasons. "I've 
received a lot of death threats, not every day but every week. I'm not 
bothered by those aspects." 

Nor is she persuaded by a recent study published in Science magazine that 
found cloning to be unreliable and potentially dangerous. "Any new thing is 
difficult to predict," she says.

"That didn't prevent other scientific advances. They were done with a lot of 
care and that's what we're trying to do with this research. Their study was 
on mice and we have more knowledge for humans. That's very poor science."

The Raelian cult was formed in 1974, a year after its leader, Claude Vorilhon, 
 now known as Rael, received the message from an alien. A 54-year-old 
former racing driver and sports journalist who lives near Montreal, Rael
claims 55 000 converts in 84 countries to his creed that cloning is the first 
step towards attaining eternal life.

Rael, who asks $100 000 for public speeches, proposes to charge $200 000 for 
each clone, but Boisselier says no one need pay anything until Clonaid has 
produced its first child.

"This couple will have a baby and will see a return on their investment, 
she says. "Do you realise that other scientists say. Because of your 
beliefs, cloning will be stopped?'

"I'm doing what I think is right. With my strange beliefs and my weirdness, 
I consider myself to be an educator. I'm trying to tell the world that having 
a baby that's a twin of an individual is not that big a deal.

"It was the same argument 20 years ago about in vitro fertilisation."

_____________________________________________

Scientists issue new warning over cloning peril

(AFP, July 6, 2001) 

WASHINGTON, July 6 (AFP) - Scientists Friday issued a new warning about the 
dangers of human cloning, saying cloned lab animals were found to harbor 
serious but outwardly undetectable genetic abnormalities.

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the 
University of Hawaii reported they had found the first evidence that gene 
functioning in clones may be prey to subtle flaws.

The finding backs suspicions in many scientific quarters that reproductive 
cloning is not only inefficient but also potentially dangerous to the cloned 
creature.

The researchers, Rudolf Jaenisch and Ryuzo Yanagimachi, sought to find out 
why cloning in animals results in so many catastrophic failures, such as 
false pregnancies, early death and chronic overgrowth.

They grew mouse clones from embryonic stem cells, the "master" cells that 
develop into all the body's different tissues.

The team then noted surprising variations in the functioning of structural 
genes -- genes whose expression varies according to its donor and which 
switched on or off by chemical tags.

The biggest differences occurred in the placenta, kidneys, heart and liver of 
the cloned mice.

The problem appears to lie in with the donor embryonic stem cells, which can 
be extremely unstable in culture. As they divide, these cells lose the tags 
that tell a gene to be either turned on or off during development.

In spite of the instability, some clones reach adulthood, suggesting that 
mammalian development is surprisingly tolerant to aberrant gene regulation.

"This suggests that even apparently normal clones may have subtle aberrations 
of gene expression that are not easily detected in the cloned animal," said 
Jaenisch.

Their research was published Friday in the US weekly Science.

The cloning procedure consists of replacing the genetic material-bearing 
nucleus of an egg with the nucleus of an adult cell or of an embryonic stem 
cell.

In theory, the egg resets the developmental clock of the nucleus back to a 
state compatible with early embryonic growth and gives rise to a new organism 
that is genetically identical to the donor cell.

Up to now, the researchers believed the nucleus of embryonic stem cells 
required less reprogramming than the nucleus of an adult cell, which has 
already committed to a certain function.

At present, five mammal species have been cloned -- sheep, mice, goats, cows 
and pigs -- but the success rate is just three to five percent.

The study was published amid a reported crackdown by US federal investigators 
into an illegal effort to clone a human being by a religious sect called the 
Raelians.

The group's chief scientist, French national Brigitte Boisselier, along with 
Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori and US doctor Richard Seed lead an 
international consortium that has announced plans to clone a 10-month-old 
baby that died during heart surgery.

On June 20, Britain's most eminent scientific body, the Royal Society, 
demanded a worldwide moratorium on human cloning, which it branded 
"unethical, dangerous and irresponsible".

_____________________________________________

UFO cult may sue U.S. FDA over human cloning

by Chriss Swaney (Reuters, July 4, 2001)

PITTSBURGH, July 4 (Reuters) - The lead scientist of a UFO cult that believes 
life on Earth was genetically engineered by visitors from outer space says 
she may go to court to protect her human cloning project from U.S. government 
scrutiny. 

Brigitte Boisselier, a French biochemist who belongs to the international 
Raelian Movement, told Reuters on Tuesday that her company Clonaid still 
plans to produce a cloned child within the next year despite a recent 
crackdown by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

"I do not want to infringe on the law. But we may have to go to federal court 
to challenge the jurisdiction of FDA agents, or any ruling that would hurt us 
from cloning a human being," said Boisselier, who is Clonaid's science 
director. 

Rael, the leader of the Swiss-based Raelian Movement, founded Clonaid in the 
Bahamas with a group of investors in 1997, the same year that Scottish 
scientists announced the cloning of the sheep Dolly. 

The Raelians, who are atheists, view cloning as the means for humankind to 
achieve eternal life and said at the time of Clonaid's launch that the 
service would offer infertile or homosexual couples the chance to have 
children. 

Boisselier said Clonaid has two labs, one near Syracuse, New York, and 
another at an undisclosed site outside the United States. 

The potential for human cloning, which aims to reproduce human beings by 
inserting their DNA into unfertilized eggs, has been widely condemned on 
moral grounds and banned in some parts of the globe. 

CONCERNS RAISED BY RESEARCHERS AND ETHICISTS 

Some researchers and ethicists also have raised concerns because of a high 
rate of failures and deformities among the animal clones that have followed 
in Dolly's wake. 

"I have had death threats, but I continue to pursue my goal of making science 
work for the improvement of mankind," said Boisselier, who maintains that her 
private company has a philosophical link but no economic ties with the 
Raelians. 

"We are doing nothing wrong. We are trying to help mankind. And we are not 
going to be stopped, even if I have to take a bullet," she added. 

In the United States, the FDA has said that human cloning experiments need 
its approval, which the agency will not give for the time being because of 
safety concerns.  Members of Congress, concerned that FDA authority does not 
go far enough, have introduced legislation to ban human cloning for 
reproduction. 

FDA officials inspected Clonaid's Syracuse lab after Boisselier testified 
about the company's activities before a congressional panel in March. An FDA 
spokesman said she has agreed in writing not to conduct human cloning 
experiments or pursue research involving human eggs in the United States. 

But Boisselier, who is now traveling the country and speaking to journalists 
in hopes of drumming up public support for cloning, said she will not be 
deterred. 

"I have five scientists working around the clock," she said. "(Human cloning) 
may happen here in the United States, or at our other lab. It all depends on 
how we and our work are accepted in this country, and how we progress with 
our plan to have a child cloned within the next year or so." 

Billed as the world's largest UFO-related nonprofit group with 55,000 members 
in 84 countries, the Raelian Movement claims that ancient extraterrestrial 
scientists, whom the Bible refers to as Elohim, created all life on Earth 
through genetic engineering, including human beings whom they made in their 
own image. 

Group founder Rael was formerly known as French journalist Claude Vorilhon 
before he reported being contacted by the Elohim in 1973. 

"I know that usually people laugh at that. But, to me, this scientific 
creation theory is probably the most rational one -- not believing in any 
almighty God, not believing in evolution without explaining the links," 
Boisselier said. 

"We do not plan to create an army of clones but rather we want to help 
families who have lost children or want desperately to have a child," she 
added. "I want to use science for the creation of life, not death. I want to 
make babies, not bombs." 

Recent press reports have said that Clonaid's financial backers include a 
couple whose baby died at 10 months and who hope their child can be 
reproduced through human cloning. 

"I know there have been ethical issues raised about cloning. But within 10 
years, cloning will be available to everyone," she said. 

 _____________________________________________

Cult Agrees Not to Clone Human in U.S.

("New York Times," July 2, 2001)

WASHINGTON, July 1 — Federal regulators have inspected a laboratory run by a
secretive religious sect intent on cloning a person and have obtained a
written pledge from the group's lead scientist not to experiment with cloning
in this country, both the scientist and the Food and Drug Administration said.

The scientist, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, has signed an agreement "not to
attempt human cloning in the United States and not to do research using human
eggs in the United States" until the legality of human cloning is settled by
Congress or the courts, Larry Bachorik, a spokesman for the agency, said on
Friday.

Dr. Boisselier said she had experimented only with eggs of cows. She said she
did not know how agency officials found her laboratory.

The agency inspected the laboratory in April, several weeks after she
testified before Congress about her plans, she said.

Dr. Boisselier is a member of the Raelian religious sect, which believes in
extraterrestrial visitors. She said she would open a laboratory outside the
United States but would not say where.

 _____________________________________________

US authorities crack down on human cloning efforts

(Australia Broadcasting Corporation, July 1, 2001)

US federal investigators have uncovered a secret laboratory where members of
a religious sect were experimenting with human cloning, according to media
reports Saturday.

A grand jury in Syracuse, New York, subpoenaed telephone records and other
documents as part of an investigation into a lab run by members of the
Raelian sect, which believes scientists from another planet created all life
on Earth, according to a US News and World Reports article.

The Raelian chief scientist, French national Brigitte Boisselier, along with
Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori and US doctor Richard Seed, lead an
international consortium that has announced plans to clone a human being.

Clonaid, a company with links to the Raelians, seeks to reproduce by cloning
a 10-month-old baby that died during heart surgery, at the request of the
baby's US parents.

"I haven't done anything that is illegal and I will never do," Boisselier, a
"bishop" of the sect said.

She said she was prepared to carry on her experiments outside the United
States.

The US Food and Drug Administration warned her in a hand-delivered letter in
late March that the lab may have been violating FDA regulations, after
Boisselier claimed that her facility was mere weeks away from being ready to
clone a human being, US News wrote.

 _____________________________________________

Group to move cloning efforts offshore after FDA warning

by Aaron Zitner  ("Los Angeles Times," June 30, 2001)

    WASHINGTON -- An obscure religious group said Friday that it would move 
its efforts to clone a human being offshore after the Food and Drug 
Administration paid a surprise visit to its laboratory and warned that 
cloning could not be done without agency permission. 
   Brigitte Boisselier, who leads the Raelian Movement's cloning project, 
said FDA officials discovered the secret location of the lab and made an 
inspection in mid-April. 
   She said that technicians there were working with biological material from 
cows, which is legal. 
   "They couldn't find a human egg, and so they couldn't shut us down," 
Boisselier said. "In fact, the lab is still running here in the U.S., and we 
are still doing things that are legal." 
   FDA spokesman Lawrence Bachorik said Boisselier had signed an agreement 
"not to attempt cloning in the United States and not to do research using 
human eggs in the United States until the legality of human cloning is 
ascertained" by Congress or federal courts. 
   Human cloning is barred in several states, and Congress is now deciding 
whether to make it a federal crime. 
   The Raelian cloning effort received wide attention in March, when 
Boisselier discussed it at a congressional hearing. She told lawmakers that 
the group had established a laboratory, hired staff and intended to work 
toward cloning a boy who had died of a heart defect at the age of 10 months. 
   Boisselier said the group may go to federal court to challenge the FDA's 
jurisdiction over cloning, said Boisselier, a chemist. 
   Neither Boisselier nor the FDA would give the location of the laboratory. 
Boisselier said five people are working there. 
   Raelians are led by the Frenchman Claude Vorilhon, who took the name Rael 
after claiming that he witnessed a UFO landing in 1973. 

 _____________________________________________

Sect worships science, aims to clone baby boy

by Bryn Nelson ("Seattle Times," April 29, 2001)
 

CLINTON, N.Y. - The sun is hinting at an appearance after what seemed an 
eternity of rain. Remaining piles of snow have been relegated to ditches 
along the steep road that leads to Hamilton College, and for a moment, the 
only reminder of a raging ethical storm here is the silver pendant dangling 
from Brigitte Boisselier's neck. 
Boisselier, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry, smiles and 
apologizes for being late. 

Her silver pendant mimics the Star of David, with added swirls meeting at the 
center to represent the eternity of time and matter. It identifies Boisselier 
as a Raelian, one of between 25,000 and 55,000 members of a sect whose 
religion is science. 

But perhaps more important, it intimates her belief that humans were created 
through the intelligent design of extraterrestrials, and her belief that a 
continuation of the creative cycle and the secret of eternal life itself can 
be revealed by cloning a baby boy. 

Oh, they will clone others, she says. But the baby boy, a 10-month-old who 
died during heart surgery, will be first. His parents, who wish to stay 
anonymous, have given $500,000 to fund the first year of the project, called 
Clonaid, estimated to cost more than $1 million. Boisselier is scientific 
director, and 55 Raelian women have volunteered as surrogate mothers to help 
defy the low probability of success. 

"I feel that cloning is right, that science is right as long as we use it to 
do good," Boisselier says. 

Hamilton College's faculty and 1,740 students have had little time to adjust 
to the media maelstrom since Boisselier's cloning interests came to light in 
February through two independently published magazine articles. 

"There was a great deal of surprise," college spokesman Mike Debraggio says. 
"This (human cloning) is not only here, but we have someone on campus who is 
a leading proponent." Boisselier will resign next month to focus on Clonaid. 
But her impact will linger. 

In 1997, Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut introduced Dolly the sheep - the 
first clone of an adult mammal. Wilmut and his team replaced the nucleus in a 
sheep's unfertilized egg, with a nucleus from an adult sheep's mammary gland. 
They coaxed the egg to begin dividing as if it had been fertilized, tricking 
the donor nucleus into resetting its genes to early embryonic states and 
allowing the resulting embryo to be implanted into the uterus of a surrogate. 

Human cloning would work much the same to produce an identical genetic copy 
of a person, although environmental conditions would ensure that the clone 
would retain unique characteristics. 

But even Wilmut and other cloning pioneers such as Rudolf Jaenisch have 
blasted the idea of performing the feat on humans. 

"I think it's outrageous," says Jaenisch, reached by telephone at the 
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. "It's 
reckless and irresponsible ... at this stage." 

Boisselier says she was thrilled about Dolly, because it meant human cloning 
was imminent, as foretold by the French prophet Rael, the Raelians' spiritual 
leader and a former race-car driver. 

In 1997, after receiving a master's degree in biological chemistry from the 
University of Dijon in France, a doctorate in physical chemistry from the 
same university, and a doctorate in analytical chemistry from the University 
of Houston, the native Frenchwoman told the Paris daily Le Monde that cloning 
humans was OK. 

Within four weeks of the article, she says, she was fired from her job at the 
French chemical giant Air Liquide. 

Air Liquide spokeswoman Joelle Ambon says Boisselier was asked to leave her 
post as a sales manager because her private activity, a leadership position 
within the Raelian movement, was taking too much time from her obligations to 
the company's customers. 

Boisselier sued for religious discrimination and won on appeal. But she was 
losing other battles. She lost custody of her youngest daughter to her 
ex-husband. 

Boisselier retreated to Montreal with her son to be near some of her Raelian 
friends. 

Her eldest daughter was already a college student in Montreal, and Boisselier 
was able to devote more time to Clonaid. 

Then her passion for teaching flared. Timothy Elgren, who helped interview 
Boisselier at Hamilton, said it's hard to say whether she would have been 
hired had her outside activities had been known. But he noted that her 
commitment to Clonaid as scientific director didn't begin until after she had 
signed with Hamilton. 

Boisselier says her team of a geneticist, two biologists and a specialist of 
in vitro fertilization are working at an undisclosed location to perfect the 
cloning steps. 

"I am not here telling you I'm an expert in cloning," she says. "But I know 
how to find the right scientists." She says she's not about to rush into 
anything without addressing safety concerns. "I know that if... the first 
clone baby has any defects, I will not be able to return to a project like 
that, and somebody won't be able to touch that for 20 years," she says. 

Which is perhaps the real reason any carefully monitored pregnancy will be 
aborted at the first sign of trouble. 

Boisselier says her company has had inquiries from infertile couples, parents 
grieving the loss of a child, gays and lesbians, and older singles who reason 
that raising a "belated twin" would be easier than finding a partner and 
conceiving in the traditional way. 

Clonaid isn't alone. Former University of Kentucky reproductive specialist 
Dr. Panos Zavos has announced his intent to clone a human in an undisclosed 
Mediterranean country. 

He say he's already attracted hundreds of couples. 

"I wish him well," Boisselier says, "If he does succeed before I do, in a 
certain sense I win." 

After all, few scientists were speaking openly about human cloning four years 
ago. Now, most of them consider it inevitable. 

 _____________________________________________

Raelian Religion: New Scientific Discoveries Corroborate RAEL's Statements

(PR Newswire, April 9, 2001)
 

MIAMI, April 9 /PRNewswire/ -- 

The following was released today by theRaelian Religion:

    There exists an infinite number of universes like ours that are eternal.
This is in essence what scientists from the University of Barcelona and Tufts
University in Boston have recently announced.
    Their theory, which will be published next fall in the Gravitation and
Quantum Cosmology Journal, is in fact totally confirmed by research done by
Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    This theory of an infinite universe was announced 28 years ago by RAEL,
founder of the Raelian Movement, among other predictions such as the
possibility of cloning a human being and surpassing the speed of light. Each
day, new discoveries are made and corroborate what the Elohim, our creators,
have transmitted to RAEL.

Clone artist

Dozens of major media outlets, from 60 Minutes to

The New York Times, have reported recently that the
Raelians, a Quebec-based free-love cult, are about
to clone a millionaire's dead baby in their secret

laboratory. JAN WONG investigates the Raelians -- who
also say the human race was created by super-aliens
and that their leader is Christ's half-brother -- and
wonders, why on Earth does anybody believe them? 

by Jan Wong ("Globe & Mail," (Canada) April 7, 2001)

White candles flicker alongside a dish of fresh strawberries. Diane Brisebois 

clutches a microphone, torch-singer style. She's sexy in tight pants and red 
lipstick, curls cascading over her shoulders. "At 11, as we always do," she 
says, "we will make telepathic contact with our leaders."

Brisebois is the chief priestess in Ontario for the Raelians (rhymes with 
"aliens"). It's only 10:35 a.m., because, an organizer explains, it takes 25 
minutes to reach the extraterrestrials called Elohim (rhymes with "annoying").

To Raelians, evolution is bunk. The Elohim cloned their own DNA to create the 
human race in a laboratory 25,000 years ago, according to Rael, the one-named 
cult leader, a transplanted Frenchman who lives half the year in Florida and 
the other half at UFOland, the Raelians' theme park and condo complex about 
an hour northeast of Montreal.

Rael founded his sect in France in 1973, but it is now based in Quebec. It 
claims 55,000 members in 84 countries, but the real number is probably half 
that. Now 54, Rael advocates sensual massage, nude meditation, free love, and 
eternal life through human cloning.

He'd also like you to tithe your after-tax income. And until you can clone 
yourself, he requests that when you die, you leave the bulk of your worldly 
possessions to the sect. Its plans include an embassy, complete with 
spaceship landing pad, for the Elohim's scheduled return in 2035. So far, it 
has raised about $11-million.

In the meantime, the cult hopes to reap an even bigger windfall. Targeting a 
growing market of bereaved parents, infertile or same-sex couples, and your 
average megalomaniac, the Raelians plan to clone the first human. Or so they 
have declared in dozens of interviews to pliant, panting media, and, last 
week, in testimony before the U.S. Congress.

"A grieving family hopes to replace a lost child. A genetics-obsessed sect 
dreams of achieving immortality. Is this how human cloning will begin?" asked 
the display copy on Margaret Talbot's New York Times Magazine cover story in 
February.

"Two groups announce human cloning plans," CNN reported in March, right along 
with "Lung cancer rising in women."

"Human cloning project may have begun," headlined USA Today. "Is this what 
Aldous Huxley warned us about?" fretted the National Post.

Everyone including 60 Minutes to Good Morning America to Dan Rather has duly 
reported that the cult has a bereaved and very rich American couple 
bankrolling its effort. The unnamed couple wants to clone their 10-month-old 
son who died following an operation two years earlier.

News groups have also repeated the Raelians' claim to have 50 wombs at their 
disposal. One belongs to Brisebois. Another belongs to the eldest daughter of 
Brigitte Boisselier, chairman, chief executive officer and "scientific 
director" of Clonaid, the cult's cloning company.

Finally, the media swallow whole the Raelian story that they have a lab up 
and running in the United States -- even though no one has ever seen it -- 
and that they are cloning a human as you read this.

The Raelians have a history of stunning announcements followed by zero 
results. In 1997, when Dolly the sheep was cloned, the Raelians said they had 
more than a million customers and were building a laboratory in the Bahamas.

"It was just a P.O. box," admits Rael, formerly a wannabe race-car driver 
named Claude Vorilhon. "There was nothing. We wanted to see if there was 
interest from potential customers, potential investors, from scientists."

In their current media blitz, the Raelians have not had to buy a single ad to 
let potential customers know they are selling human eggs for $5,000 (U.S.), 
storing DNA samples for $50,000 and cloning babies for $200,000. Make that 
$500,000. Or $1-million. As publicity builds, the price keeps going up.

Cloning isn't explicitly outlawed in Canada or most of the United States, 
although U.S. President George W. Bush has signalled he'd like to pass 
legislation soon. But scientists now say that cloned humans could be prone to 
a high risk of genetic abnormalities. Cow clones often have enlarged hearts.

And, as The New York Times has reported, some mouse clones that looked normal 
at first have become obese in maturity, even though they eat the same amount 
of food as other mice.

Though Boisselier is a chemist, not a geneticist, that doesn't stop Clonaid's 
scientific director from stating that the "success rate for cloning cattle is 
15 to 30 per cent." It's actually 1 per cent. It took 277 tries before 
scientists succeeded in producing Dolly the sheep. And a three-year, 
$3.7-million effort in Texas to clone a mongrel dog named Missy for an 
anonymous West Coast billionaire has so far failed.

But why let facts get in the way of a good story? No matter how strange they 
are. There's Rael's claim that he's Christ's half-brother, for instance. Or 
Centre UFOland's pictures of little green men and its life-size plywood 
replica of the flying saucer Rael boarded in 1973. Or the Raelian claim of 
covering a distance of two light years in 25 minutes, sans spacecraft. That's 
what we're doing here on this frozen Sunday morning.

Brisebois is leading the monthly meditation. She instructs us to breathe 
deeply. We're about to visit another planet. Only 22 devotees have shown up 
for the ride. They sit, eyes closed, on orange vinyl chairs. In deference to 
the weather, no one disrobes. The men look ordinary. The women are almost all 
attractive, or at least have made a major effort to that end. Everyone seems 
to be wearing identical medallions, a swirl within the six-pointed Star of 
David.

We're on the fourth floor of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 
on Bloor Street in Toronto. A huge photograph of a bare-chested Rael is 
propped on a table. I don't feel any breeze when Brisebois, an ex-Quebecker, 
announces that we are flying through the sky. I do notice the Bloor Street 
subway line rumbling beneath the building every four minutes.
"You can see Lake Ontario," she murmurs. "And the cars are getting smaller. 

The planet is now just a tiny blue dot. And you are among the stars. On your 
right side, you see a beautiful star. You start going toward it."

Suddenly a man bolts. Does he know a shortcut? No, he's merely having a 
coughing fit in the hall. Brisebois announces we've just landed on the planet 
of the Elohim, one light year from Earth (which is odd, because astronomers 
say the closest star is four light years away).

After briefly hanging around a marvellous green forest I can't see, she leads 
us back to Toronto. She points out the North American continent, then the 
Great Lakes. "You can recognize the Bay," she adds, referring to the 
department store's Bloor Street branch. Ta-dah! We're back. Everyone claps. 
Two Raelians pass around envelopes, collecting $5 here, $20 there.
Chatting later, Brisebois says that she joined the Raelians when she was 16. 
She subsequently had sex with Rael whenever he was in Montreal. "It was 
wonderful," she breathes. "I loved him in the past, and I still love him."

Like many Raelians, Brisebois is childless by choice. But, she says, "I think 
it would be wonderful to be the surrogate mother of the first cloned child." 
She admits that she hasn't had a single one of the many drug injections 
required to prep a woman's body to accept a foreign embryo. So is she a 
bonafide volunteer? "I'm 41," she concedes. "That would make me borderline."

Marina Cocolios, however, is a picture of female fecundity. At 22, she has a 
peaches-and-cream complexion and shiny dark eyes. As Boisselier's daughter, 
she's also the surrogate-mom volunteer the Raelians always trot out for media 
interviews.

This week, she's done CTV and a Dutch magazine. Later, she'll talk to 
Japanese TV reporters. She has the routine down pat. She meets reporters at 
this Second Cup on St. Denis Street in Montreal and orders herbal tea and 
chocolate cake. Then she parries questions. She's met the cloning couple, of 
course, but she is absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about them.
Cocolios turns heads with her shapely figure, swathed in a caramel leather 
skirt and snug black sweater with eyelet stitching just below the bra line. 
Lovely as she is, conversations with her tend to veer off into outer space. 
Take her plans for the future. After she graduates from Concordia University 
where she is in third-year fine arts, she plans to teach art. Then she'd like 
to open a school for abused children. Later, she wants to study science.
And after that? "Then I want to go to another planet as an artist and 
scientist." Last year, her performance art consisted of donning an antique 
white nightgown and bathing with red wine. "It was extremely sensual," she 
recalls. This year she's working on a paper dress covered with quotations 
from Rousseau, Sartre and, yes, Rael.

Cocolios, a French citizen, has no plans for any children of her own. She's 
already had one abortion. But she'd be thrilled to carry the first cloned 
human embryo. "It's like having a pregnancy not just for yourself, but for 
the whole world. Isn't it beautiful?"

As Boisselier's daughter, she should have the inside track. Yet she has never 
been to her mother's cloning lab. And, like Brisebois, she has not donated 
any eggs or undergone the heavy drug regimen required for implanting an 
embryo. Has she done anything at all to prepare herself for this momentous 
step? Cocolios smiles. Her ex-boyfriend, a Raelian who decided he'd be 
happier living in Europe, gave her cream for stretch marks.
Raelians love publicity. They issue press releases. They stage stunts, like 
distributing condoms to Montreal high-school students in 1992 to protest 
against the Catholic Church's stand on birth control. They even have 
publicists, like Sylvie Chabot, a Montreal consultant whose business cards 
carry Rael's photo and identify her as "Rael's press attache."

Raelians also love hierarchy. They group themselves into six levels, ranging 
from novice to Rael himself, who alone occupies the 6th level. Cocolios is a 
3rd-level Raelian and a "regional guide." Chabot, a 4th-level Raelian and a 
"national guide," sets up an interview with Lear, a 5th-level Raelian.

Lear (Rael spelled backwards) is a "bishop" and "continental head" for North 
America, and Rael's top aide. Like his mentor, Lear goes by only one name. 
His real surname is Potvin, but he says his real first name is too dorky to 
reveal. We meet for dinner at Jardin Sakura on Mountain Street in Montreal. 
It's Lear's favourite restaurant, and he orders without even glancing at the 
menu: miso soup, a giant sushi-sashimi platter, and a couple of orders of 
barbequed eel and raw sea urchin.

Raelians may be casual about nude meditation, but they're quite formal about 
interviews. Chabot, a slim angular woman with hennaed hair and watchful eyes, 
insists on joining us. She joined the Raelians when she was 25. Now 46, 
thrice-divorced and childless by choice, she's weirdly secretive. Her 
brother, Daniel Chabot, heads the Canadian Raelian movement and teaches 
psychology at a Montreal CEGEP. Asked which one, she says, "I don't know. 
Somewhere in Montreal."

Lear, who is an artist, designed the medallions every cult member wears. His 
own is the size of a Pringle's potato-chip canister lid. "I had a bigger 
one," he says, "but somebody stole it at the gym out of my bag."

Lear also designed Centre UFOland. It consists of a museum devoted to DNA and 
extraterrestrials, the plywood flying saucer, a snack bar, souvenir shop, 
campsite, 500-seat dining hall and six condos for top Raelians, including 
Rael and Boisselier. (It is open to the public only in the summertime.)
"I'll take a little sake, but don't tell Rael," says Lear, smoothing back his 
longish dark hair, which has bleached tips. Raelians, he explains, aren't 

supposed to smoke, drink or take drugs, even caffeine. (Chabot also sneaks a 
cup of sake.)

Lear is childless, too. He doesn't want a squalling baby, but he would like 
to be cloned, as an adult, and download his memories into the new body. 
Exactly how is unclear. "It's going to be possible soon. One will have 
eternal life." The promise of perpetual youth through cloning could be why so 
many attractive women are drawn to the Raelians -- and they, in turn, draw in 
the men.

"I would keep my mind," Chabot says enthusiastically, "but in a new body, 
when I was 17 years old, when I was young and sexy." As a lapsed Catholic, 
Lear isn't afraid of going to hell. "But if they tell me I'll never come back 
to sushi, I'll be sad."

Clearly, he's no starving artist. He dines at Sakura several times a week. 
Soon, he'll fly to Florida to relax on the beach and play the ball game 
petanque with Rael. Lear also has a health-club membership, a black 
Volkswagen Jetta with heated seats, and two homes. He needs two, he explains, 
for the inevitable day when he and his Raelian girlfriend split up.

Lear, who is 37, became a Raelian at 14. A neighbour in the Quebec village of 
Lac St.-Jerome gave him The Message Given by Extra-Terrestrials, the first of 
Rael's half-dozen books. (His latest, Yes to Human Cloning, is about to be 
published by the sect.)

In the first book, the author describes how, at 27, as an auto-sports 
journalist and aspiring race driver, he boarded a hovering flying saucer in 
Auvergne, in southern France, in December, 1973. For six days straight, a 
little green man explained in fluent French the origin of Earthlings. He also 
unravelled all those mysteries in the Bible. The miracle of Jesus feeding the 
multitudes with just 20 loaves of bread, for example, was merely "synthetic 
dehydrated food -- which, when added to water, increased to five times its 
original volume."

The space alien informed Claude that his true father was an extra-terrestrial 
who had impregnated Claude's mother. (The same E.T., by the way, who had 
earlier inseminated Mary, mother of Jesus.) The alien asked Claude to spread 
the word and to change his name to Rael, which means "messenger" in 
space-speak.

Two years later, Rael was whisked to that same planet we visited during the 
Sunday meditation. There he met Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. Moses was there, 
too. It turns out that, like Jesus and Rael, Moses is of mixed parentage 
(which may explain the confusion in the bulrushes).

Like a New-Age Hugh Hefner, Rael enjoyed perfumed baths and, with the aid of 
six voluptuous robots, other favours. It was, he writes, "the most 
extravagant night" of his life.

Suddenly Chabot starts talking about green lists and pink lists and 
blacklists. "Every journalist has one chance," she says, pushing away her 
plate of sushi. "When we don't like what they write, they're on a blacklist." 

The pink list, she adds, means the journalist is "pure." She stares at me. 

"You're on the green list. It means green light, go ahead."

Chabot is tired of Earthling ridicule and contempt. She can't wait until the 
first cloned baby is born. Then all those blacklisted media types will 
besiege her for interviews. "And I'll say, 'Sorry,' " she gloats. Lear gets 
into the spirit: "When the Elohim come to our embassy, we'll remember who has 
been disrespectful and we'll let them line up. And then we'll make them go 
back to the end of the line." He laughs uproariously.

I may not be on the green list for long, so I quickly request an interview 
with Rael himself. Like many Quebeckers, cult leaders or no, he winters in 
Florida. For several years now, he's been the semi-permanent houseguest of a 
devout Raelian in North Miami Beach. Chabot says Rael gives only one 
interview a day, for one hour, always at 4:15 p.m.
Why 4:15? "Because this is his schedule." 

Part 2--"Clone artist"

It's 4:15 p.m. in North Miami Beach. The only clue about the unusual 
inhabitant of this stucco bungalow is the white Mazda van in the driveway. 
Its vanity plate says: RAELIAN.

Marie-Helene Parent, the owner of the house, answers the door. Three other 
Raelians, all wearing the medallion, are waiting in the living room, which is 
decorated with the familiar bare-chested photograph of Rael. They don't shake 
hands. They don't introduce themselves. They don't smile. One woman adjusts a 
video camera on a tripod. "We always tape," she says. "For the archives."
As if from nowhere, Rael makes his entrance. With his moustache and goatee, 
he could be mistaken for a magician in a lounge act in Rimouski, Que. At 54, 
his thinning grey hair is swept up into a tiny bun the size of an apricot. 
Not counting the topknot, he's a surprisingly scrawny 5-foot-7, and 136 
pounds. As usual, he's wearing an all-white outfit straight out of a Star 
Trek rerun: white turtleneck, white polyester pants and matching top, with a 
samurai collar and padded sloping shoulders.

First things first: Where does Rael get these outfits? Answer: A Montreal 
tailor makes them from his own sketches. "It's all machine washable," he 
says. "Do you like it?" Searching for a diplomatic adjective, I say it looks, 
um, hot.

And what's up with the topknot? "It's the remaining hair," says Rael. "Soon 
it will be just a little . . ." He makes a circle with his fingers, the size 
of an olive, and laughs. The other Raelians laugh along with him, but 
decorously.

Third question: Why are his appointments always at 4:15 p.m.? "I'm busy 
before." Doing what? "Arranging the movement in the world." Rael says he 
spends about 10 hours a day on his computer, e-mailing supporters and playing 
computer games, especially virtual-reality car-racing, complete with a 
steering wheel.
Behind him is a painting by Lear, portraying one of the Elohim as a pale, 
almond-eyed E.T. They don't look like that, Rael says. So what do they look 
like? "Like Asian people who have a liver problem," he says. I burst out 
laughing. No one else does.

Like Cocolios, Rael gives space-cadet answers to the simplest questions. His 
mother was Catholic, his father, Jewish -- he thought, until he found out he 
was half E.T. Forgetting his relationship to Jesus, I ask if he has any 
siblings. "Not to my knowledge, on Earth," he says gravely.
Rael has never tested his DNA against his Earthling father's. "There is 
nothing to find," he says. "The genetic code of the Elohim mixed with human 
people created the Jewish people. It will show you I am Jewish and nothing 
more."

What does his 82-year-old mom make of her extremely close encounter of the 
third kind? Rael says that the aliens "erased the memory" of her 
impregnation. But she does tell him, "I understand now why you were so 
different from other children."

Rael dropped out of school at 15, busked on Paris street corners and dreamed 
of racing cars. One day it dawned on him that if he started his own 
sports-car magazine, he could gain entry to racetracks, and maybe get to 
test-drive new models. So he founded Autopop magazine. He also married and 
had two children. Three years later, he met the space alien and formed the 
Raelian movement. Soon thereafter, his wife filed for divorce.

But the alien didn't tell him to stop racing. UFOland displays the trophy 
from his best race, a third-place finish in the 1997 Dodge Dealers of 
Connecticut Grand Prix. Asked how he has done lately, Rael says, "Okay." An 
embarrassed silence ensues. "This will be my last year of racing," he says, 
adding that he doesn't drive much in Miami because he finds it too slow. 
Instead, his hostess usually chauffeurs him around.
A curvaceous young woman enters the room and sprawls on a divan. It's Sophie
de Niverville, Rael's current wife, whose bare-breasted photos he displays in 
abundance at his UFOland condo. She's 25, a second-generation Raelian from 
Quebec, whom he married nearly 10 years ago, right after her 16th birthday. 
(Her Raelian mother consented to the match.)

Sophie doesn't work. She doesn't want children. Her only job is to be his 
wife. Alas, she couldn't even cook at first. So Rael, who loves to eat, 
taught her the basics. "For three weeks we ate only eggs," he says. Sophie 
smiles placidly. Then she excuses herself to prepare Rael's dinner of grilled 
Chilean sea bass.

Warming to the subject of food, Rael tells me how much he loves Peking duck. 
Of France's top restaurants, he particularly recommends Laguiole, which he 
says has three Michelin stars. "It's five hours from Paris, and half the 
price," he enthuses. Isn't that a bit far to go for a meal? He chuckles at my 
naivete. "They have a heliport."

Like Lear, Rael draws no salary. But he lives well off book royalties and his 

supporters. All his expenses are covered by Raelian foundations. "People who 
want to help me buy good food -- Peking duck -- [give me] 1 per cent" of  their net 

income.

We're getting sidetracked. Having read three of his books, I understand why 
the proposed embassy design calls for a spaceship landing pad. But why the 
swimming pool and a dining room that seats 21? "I don't know," he says with a 
shrug. "I just transmit."

The Raelians want to establish their embassy in Jerusalem, for sentimental 
reasons, because that's where the Elohim ran their first cloning lab. They've 
asked Israel seven times. Seven times, they've been refused, perhaps because 
they request demilitarized air space for flying saucers.

I ask Rael how, as a high-school dropout, he managed to become such an expert 
in biotechnology. He smiles modestly and says that all his knowledge was 
transmitted to him directly by the Elohim.

By now, the hour is running out. I finally confess that I don't believe they 
are cloning anything. "People are afraid it's a joke, that there's no lab," 
Rael cheerfully concedes.

He recently met the cloning couple in Miami. Of course, he is absolutely not 
at liberty to disclose anything about them at this time. He will say only 
that they are filthy rich and that the husband is the main investor in 
Clonaid. For a $1-million investment in the company, the man got a 
40-per-cent stake -- with the first cloned baby thrown in for free.

The price tag for the second baby was supposed to be $200,000. But now, Rael 

says, there are 2,000 people on the waiting list. "That's $400-million," he 

says happily. "When we have a baby, maybe the list will jump from 2,000 to 
20,000. I don't think the lab will be able to make so many clones. So my 
advice to Brigitte is to make an auction." In other words, the second baby 
will go to the highest bidder.

Rael is unperturbed by my skepticism. "I can give you two scoops," he says 
graciously. One company is about to organize an initial public offering of 
Clonaid. And two venture-capital companies have each offered $5-million for 5 
per cent. "That means Clonaid is worth $100-million." Of course, he is 
absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about the companies at this 
time. "Ask Brigitte," he says, referring to Boisselier.

And the second scoop? "Brigitte is invited to testify in front of the U.S. 
Congress."

This one turns out to be true. Among her revelations there is that Clonaid's 
rich client is "a successful attorney, a former state legislator, a current 
elected official." In his countertestimony, Thomas Murray, president of the 
bioethics think tank the Hastings Centre, warned of cloning promoters who 
"engender false hopes," and "the likelihood of exploiting parents who are 
desperate in their grief." And even the pro-cloning Human Cloning 
Foundation's Randolphe Wicker called the Raelians "space-cadet wackos" who 
are "defrauding the parents of dying children" and merely "seeking money for 
their prophet."

Next, Rael offers me yet another scoop. "Your third one today," he says. 
"It's your lucky day." Rael says that he is offering to share Clonaid's lab 
with Dr. Severino Antinori, a fertility specialist who has declared his own 
ambition to clone the world's first human embryo. (The Raelians are not 
really expecting a response, but they figure the offer will make headlines, 
since Antinori is rather publicity-mad.)

And then Rael is gone.

Suddenly, Sophie pops back into the living room with scoop No. 4. "Rael just 
got an e-mail from Brigitte," she says breathlessly. "He's invited to speak 
before Congress as a religious leader in favour of cloning."

"Do we look alike? You're looking back and forth at us," says Brigitte 
Boisselier, 45, watching me compare her to her daughter. Now that she 
mentions it, they could be clones. They are both on the short side, with long 
raven hair, pillowy lips and a taste for high-heeled platform boots.

We're having high tea at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal. Cocolios has 
tagged along, as has the watchful Chabot, plus a glamourous and silent 
Raelian from Japan who seems to go by only one name, Shizue. Female 
pulchritude is so plentiful at our table that when the waiter whisks away the 
vase of flowers to make room for finger sandwiches and scones, he gushes, 
"You don't need these flowers because you are the flowers."

Because caffeine is verboten, three of the women order orange juice. 
Boisselier, who has two doctoral degrees in chemistry, produces her own tea 
bag. She's apparently unaware that the Yunnan Tuocha she's drinking is a 
fermented black Chinese tea buzzing with caffeine.

Boisselier is fresh from an interview with CNN. She's dressed in a tight 
white suit with a large section cut out of the chest, exposing a fair amount 
of cleavage. Modesty is given a nod by a black stretch bandeau that she wears 
underneath.

Until 1997, she worked for Air Liquide Group in France. The company fired 
her, she says, after she advocated human cloning. After several years of 
unemployment, she taught for a year at Plattsburg State University in upstate 
New York. Since last fall, she's been a visiting assistant professor at tiny 
Hamilton College, also in upstate New York, teaching third-year biochemistry. 
(This week she resigned -- voluntarily, she says -- to devote herself 
full-time to the cloning project.)

Boisselier says she owns the majority of Clonaid, but won't say exactly how 
much. When I mention that Rael said to ask her the names of the 
venture-capital companies, she snaps, "What he forgot is that this is 
confidential."

By now, her black bandeau has slipped dangerously low. Cocolios whispers 
something to her mother, who glances down and yanks it up. "It's good to be 
with my daughter," she says with a smile. (Boisselier's ex-husband, a 
non-Raelian, has custody in France of their youngest daughter, 12. Their son, 
17, a non-Raelian and studies science at university.

Boisselier contradicts Rael over how much the cloning couple has invested in 
Clonaid. It's $500,000, she says, not $1-million. Of course, she also is 
absolutely not at liberty to disclose anything about them at this time. She 
won't even say where Clonaid is headquartered. Ditto for the lab. Ditto for 
the scientists, except to say there are three, and one works "part-time" at 
Harvard. When I press her on her genetics credentials, she says her real 
talent is for organizing research teams.

Like Rael, she readily admits that four years ago, when the Raelians 
announced they were cloning a human, they had nothing. "We had no lab in the 
Bahamas. We started a company there. It was so easy. People thought we had 
something there. We never did."

This is the last stop on my 2001 space odyssey. I tell Boisselier that I 
don't believe her lab exists. Like Rael, she doesn't get mad. She dangles an 
exclusive. One journalist -- and only one -- will have a chance to visit her 
lab and follow the cloning process from beginning to end. I'm duty-bound to 
go through the motions. How about me? I ask. Boisselier says she doesn't know 
me. Ask me anything, I offer. Would I agree to embargo the story for 18 
months from now? Sure, I say. "But we have a lot of candidates," she says, 
ending the discussion.

Before Congress last week, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Dr. Arthur 
Caplan said, "No reputable scientist[s], other than cults, cranks, kooks and 
capitalists, believe that science is ready for human cloning." He said the 
best you can expect is "to make an obese, demented cancerous version of 
yourself." But other experts testified that human cloning is within reach. 
And as far as the Raelians are concerned, a cloned baby is always just around 
the corner -- in time for each journalist's deadline.

Last fall, Boisselier told The New York Times that Clonaid would clone a baby 
this winter. In January, she told Time magazine that they would start in 
February. In February she told Saturday Night magazine that they would clone 
in March. (The magazine ran a luscious photo of Cocolios with this caption: 
"If all goes according to plan, by the time you read this she'll be pregnant 
with a clone.")

So what is she going to tell me?
"We hope to have an embryo by mid-April."


_____________________________________________

Upstate Professor Quits to Clone Humans

by Jeane MacIntosh ("New York Post,"  April 5, 2001)

A controversial scientist with ties to a religious cult is quitting her 
upstate college teaching job to concentrate on her bizarre quest to clone a 
human baby. 
Dr. Brigitte Boisselier resigned last week as a visiting chemistry professor 
at Hamilton College, near Utica, "to focus full-time on her work in cloning," 
said school spokesman Michael Debraggio. 

The mother of three is scientific director of Clonaid, a biotech firm 
affiliated with the Raelians, a cult that teaches that humans were cloned by 
extraterrestrials. 

"We are committed to proceeding with the cloning and definitely think we'll 
have a pregnancy by the end of this year," Boisselier told The Post 
yesterday. 

She said Clonaid will go ahead with plans to do the cloning in the United 
States, unless the Food and Drug Administration gets its way. 

Last week Boisselier told a congressional panel that the FDA sent Clonaid a 
letter warning it would be violating federal regulations if it goes ahead 
with the controversial human-cloning experiment without the agency's 
approval. 

And the FDA contends that, based on safety and other issues, it would not 
give any applications the green light at this time. 

Boisselier disagrees. 

"All the lawyers I have talked to say the FDA has no jurisdiction," she said. 

"But whether it's here, in the U.S., or somewhere else, we will do it." 

She said she hopes first to clone a child for a couple anguished at the loss 
of their infant. 

"I'm just trying to have a baby for someone. We're not harming anyone," 
Boisselier said. 

"Thousands of people in the last few months have been coming to us asking to 
be cloned. This will happen eventually," she said. 

Critics of human cloning argue that it can result in myriad birth defects and 
as-yet unknown abnormalities. 

Boisselier called those fears "sensationalized." 

"They're forgetting that we have 20 years of research in human in-vitro 
fertilization," she said. 

"We know how to detect birth defects in human beings. The defects they refer 
to relate to animals and they're not related to cloning, but to the 
embryology of these animals." 

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said last week that President Bush will 
work with Congress on a federal statute to ban cloning. 

"The president believes that no research - no research - to create a human 
being should take place in the United States," Fleischer said. 

"The president believes that any attempt to clone a human being would present 
a grave risk both to the mother and the child. He opposes it on moral 
grounds." 

 
_____________________________________________

 Sect working on human cloning, scientist says

by Rick Weiss ("The Washington Post," March 29, 2001)

WASHINGTON - A scientist affiliated with an obscure religion that favors 
human cloning said yesterday that her group has begun cloning research at an 
undisclosed location in the United States. 

She would not say whether she would obey a recent Food and Drug 
Administration warning not to clone a person without that agency's approval. 

The comments to a House subcommittee were by Brigitte Boisselier, scientific 
director of the Raelian religion, which believes that humans are clones of 
extraterrestrials. The work she described involves only cow cells, and her 
claims could not be verified. 

House members said Boisselier's report, along with similar testimony from a 
scientist pursuing human cloning in a separate venture, strengthened their 
conviction that the nation needs a legislative ban. 

Boisselier's assertions before the subcommittee on oversight and 
investigations came as President Bush made his first comments on 
human-cloning legislation, saying through press secretary Ari Fleischer that 
he would support a ban. 

"The president believes that no research - no research - to create a human 
being should take place in the United States," Fleischer said, adding that 
Bush would work with Congress to draft a bill. 

Several scientists and doctors at the hearing argued against such a ban, 
however, saying it would be almost impossible not to also block legitimate 
biomedical research. Others said a ban on human cloning would undercut 
physicians' right to practice medicine and infringe on people's right to 
reproduce as they see fit. 

In a lively five-hour hearing in which some scientists accused cloning 
proponents of misleading Congress about its risks, the FDA also fielded 
withering criticism from representatives for doing "too little, too late" to 
regulate the quickly evolving field. 

Both Boisselier and Kentucky scientist Panos Zavos, who has said he is laying 
the groundwork for his own human-cloning clinic, publicized their intentions 
months ago. Yet only this week, the subcommittee learned, did the FDA contact 
the two scientists to warn them that they should not proceed without first 
submitting their protocols for FDA review. 

If the agency waits much longer before acting aggressively, warned 
subcommittee Chairman James Greenwood, R-Pa., a human clone is going to be 
growing in a woman's womb somewhere in the United States. 

"My sense is that would pose a fairly difficult enforcement situation," 
Greenwood said dryly. 

Expressing doubts that the FDA even has the legal authority to regulate 
cloning, Greenwood and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman W.J. "Billy" 
Tauzin, R-La., said the committee would introduce legislation to ban human 
cloning, probably soon after the Easter recess. 

"What we heard today is that these people are serious enough and scary enough 
to get our attention," committee spokesman Ken Johnson said. 

Rep. Brian Kerns, R-Ind., introduced the first of what could eventually 
become a raft of bills this session on the topic. 

Yesterday's hearing featured widely divergent views on the safety of human 
cloning. Zavos, the former University of Kentucky professor who has said he 
will open an offshore cloning clinic soon, testified that only a small 
proportion of cloned animals harbor serious defects. 

"I'm surprised to hear that from a professor of biology," countered 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Rudolf Jaenisch, who called 
Zavos' comments "totally irresponsible and totally misleading." In fact, 
Jaenisch said, "I don't believe there is a single normal clone in existence." 

Boisselier said she received a letter from the FDA on Monday explaining rules 
for cloning research. But she wanted to speak to her lawyer, she said, before 
deciding whether to accept the FDA's assertion of authority over cloning. 

_____________________________________________

Quebec sect will soon clone a human, leader says

("The Star," March 28, 2001)

WASHINGTON (CP) - Among the bookish biochemists and medical ethicists 
appearing before a congressional panel on cloning, there was no mistaking the 
founder of Clonaid.

He was the one wearing the snow-white pantsuit with padded shoulders, 
matching leather lace-ups and his hair pulled back and up from his balding 
pate like a follicle geyser.

Rael, founder of the Quebec-based Raelian Movement, was given all the respect 
due a mad scientist Wednesday when he appeared before a subcommittee that 
seems bent on banning human cloning.

The leader of the Raelians cheerfully insisted he was ready to clone a human 
being within months and prepared to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent 
any legislative attempt to block him.

While any challenge is being fought, Rael said, there are 100 female Raelians 
ready to carry cloned embryos.

''They say we're a cult. But we're not a religion. Our god is science,'' Rael 
said before testifying.

The parents of a 10-month-old infant who died during a routine operation are 
first in line for the Raelians' cloning experiments. But Rael said the 
ultimate goal was to allow adults to clone themselves shortly before their 
deaths.

''We would transfer, or download, or upload, your personality and your soul 
into this new being,'' he said.

Rael, who once was a French race car driver known as Claude Vorilhon, claims 
he was apprehended by extra-terrestrials on a rural French road and told he 
was a clone of the supreme extra-terrestrial being.

He said he was released by the aliens with the mission to lead a 
technological revolution around the world.

Along the way, encouraging free love became part of the plan.

Americans may denigrate the Raelians as a flaky cult but they take their 
financing of a cloning project very seriously.

Clonaid, and its scientific chief, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, have received 
respectful if not fretful coverage in the New York Times, Wired magazine and 
the CBS program 60 Minutes.

The Raelians got a somewhat cooler reception during Wednesday's hearings.

''No reputable scientist other than cults, cranks, kooks and capitalists 
believe that science is ready for human cloning,'' said Dr. Arthur Caplan, 
director of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Canadians, who are used to reading either mirthful or dismissive accounts of 
the Raelians' Canadian adventures, might wonder why the group's leader was 
afforded the honour of appearing before a congressional subcommittee.

But Congressman Billy Tauzin, who chairs the powerful Energy Committee of the 
U.S. House of Representatives, said there was an urgent need to hear from the 
Raelians.

''If the Raelians are to be believed, they are only weeks away from 
implanting a human embryo in a surrogate mother,'' Tauzin said.

''Through this hearing, the public will hopefully learn whether the Raelian 
experiment is a hoax, or whether as Time magazine reported, this group may be 
further along in human cloning than the competition.''

Despite the skepticism, Rael seemed delighted to have alighted at such a 
prominent perch in the halls of terrestrial power.

''I'm very happy we are discussing all of this. There's freedom here that you 
don't have in other countries.''

Asked about the skepticism, he said: ''There has always been skepticism of 
leading scientists. Look at Columbus, look at Galileo. The first vaccines 
were condemned, the first planes crashed.''

The Raelians claim to have a medical team working towards cloning a human 
being at an undisclosed location in the United States.

Several U.S. states have outlawed human cloning and Tauzin said he stood 
ready to introduce legislation to ban it across the country.

Clonaid, which Rael says is not directly tied to his movement, refuses to say 
where the experiments are taking place and who is conducting them. 
 

_____________________________________________

The Raelian Religion Presents the Message Given by Extraterrestrials:

Science Replaces Religion

 (PR Newswire, December 28, 2000) 

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. The following was issued today by the Raelian Religion:   

According to the Raelian Religion, life on Earth is not the result of random 
evolution a theory propagated by Darwin.  It is a deliberate creation in 
laboratories, using DNA, by an advanced human population who made us 
literally "in their image."  Traces of this epic masterpiece can be found not 
only in the Bible, but in the ancient texts of many cultures -- The word 

"Elohim" in Genesis is a plural Hebrew word which does not mean "God" in the 
singular but "Those who come from the sky."  The Elohim wish to come back to 
Earth in an Embassy built in a country respecting human rights. 

_____________________________________________

Cult in first bid to clone human

by Toby Moore and Michael Hanlon ("Daily Express-London," October 11, 2000)

A BIZARRE religious cult is to try to produce the world's first human clone 
by "re-creating" a dead girl. 

An American couple have paid £300,000 to the cult's scientists following the 
death of their 10-month-old daughter. Work will start this month on cells the 
couple preserved after the child died in what is being described as a medical 
accident. 

Yesterday controversy raged over the ethics of the plan. British cloning 
expert Prof Ian Wilmut, who created Dolly the Sheep, said : "It is absolutely 
criminal to try this in a human." 

The Rael cult believes cloning is the key to "eternal life" and claims humans 
were cloned from aliens. At a press conference in Canada it announced that up 
to 50 surrogate mothers had volunteered to carry cloned human embryos in 
their wombs. 

Dr Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director of the Raelians, which claims 
50,000 members in 85 countries, said: "We've got the funding. We anticipate 
being able to start in October." 

The Raelian cult founded by Claude Vorilhon, a 53-year-old French former 
sportswriter, has already set up Clonaid, a Bahamas company to produce babies 
for homosexual couples. Its laboratory is reported to be in a Third World 
country where human cloning is not illegal. 

Rael told the press conference in a Montreal hotel, at which he was 
surrounded by some of the surrogate mothers, that the mother of the child who 
died would not be amongst them. If the pregnancy failed, he said, she would 
not have to endure "losing the same child again." 

The Raelians offered no proof that they had any of the medical skills 
required to clone, but they last year stated their ambition to make it happen 
and, according to impartial scientists, there is no longer any technical 
reason why they should not succeed. 

The Raelian cult has been at the forefront of the informal race to produce a 
cloned child. Boisselier did not identify the American couple who have put up 
the money to produce a clone of their 10-month-old daughter from her cells. 
Neither did she identify the team who will work on the task. 

But the announcement in Montreal, last month, is being treated seriously by 
academics with no interest in the stranger aspects of the Rael religion. 

Lee Silver, a Princeton University biologist and authority of cloning 
techniques, said: "Just like the Aum Shinrikyo religious group, which 
recruited highly trained chemists to develop nerve gas for their attack on a 
Tokyo subway train, I bet that the Raelians could find the highly trained 
people they would need to carry out human cloning. 

"I get letters all the time from people who want to be cloned. I have no 
doubt it will happen very soon." 

"People with experience in vitro fertilisation would probably be able to do 
it," said Michael West, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology, in 
Massachusetts. His company has been cloning human embryo cells in the hope of 
developing medical treatments. "The directions are all in the scientific 
literature. They're not top secret." 

Experts believe that the biggest obstacle to human cloning is not that it 
requires particularly complex technical ability, but that it would take many 
failed pregnancies to achieve a success. There is also political unease over 
the process, which is why human cloning is banned in 19 countries, though not 
the United States. 

"It's a numbers game," said George Seidel, a cloning expert at Colorado 
University. "It's very likely that if you did it enough times you could make 
it work." 

Scientists generally agree that 20 human egg donors and 50 surrogate mothers 
offer the probability of making a human clone.

But leading genetics experts condemned the plan. Prof Ian Wilmut, the man who 
created Dolly the Sheep at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh condemned the 
plan. "It sounds to me like a very misguided exercise," he said. 

"Clearly everybody feels very sorry for any couple who loses a child but you 
cannot get that child back. People should realise that as a biological truth. 

"Quite apart from that, it is absolutely criminal to try this in a human." 

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association said 
the cloning bid could cause a public outcry. 

"They may succeed and if they do it will be very interesting," she said. "But 
rather than winning a Nobel Prize these people may have to face almost 
universal condemnation. 

"There's a fairly broad consensus worldwide that this is undesireable. It's 
too risky and underpinning the scientific risk there are tremendous moral and 
ethical problems. I'm not convinced that people understand how unsafe the 
science is." 

Professor Robert Winston, the test tube baby pioneer, said that cloning 
technology was so new that it would be very unliley to produce a healthy 
baby. "As they are so extremely unlikely to succeed I hardly feel the need to 
raise my voice to condemn them," he said. 

Cloning involves producing a genetic twin from a single cell, for example a 
skin cell. Cattle, mice and pigs have all been cloned since the birth of 
Dolly the sheep in Scotland in 1996. Dolly was the first mammal ever cloned 
from an adult. 

The biggest obstacle to creating a human clone is obtaining a supply of eggs. 
A scientist wishing to clone a person would need dozens of healthy human eggs 
- meaning that several women would have to be paid to have their ovaries 
stimulated with hormones - a painful and potentially dangerous process. 

Once harvested, the eggs are then denucleated - their DNA is removed using a 
fine syringe. DNA extracted from cells from the individual to be cloned is 
then injected into the egg. 

The fusion of DNA and egg is then stimulated using chemicals or an electric 
jolt. The growing embryo is cultivated in the lab until it is big enough to 
be implanted into the womb. 

Cloning in animals is a hit-and-miss affair. Hundreds of sheep eggs were 
injected to produce Dolly, although the cloning success rate has been 
improving in the years since. Even if an egg can be made to divide, it will 
not always grow into an embryo that can be implanted. And a large number of 
cloning pregnancies in sheep, cows and mice end in failure - either by 
miscarriage or the death of the newborn shortly after birth. Cloned animals 
tend to be larger than normal, and this can lead to developmental problems. 

But there is no evidence that a healthy clone is any different to a "normal" 
animal. There were fears that Dolly was ageing faster than normal - she had 
been cloned from a six-year-old ewe - but these fears appear to be unfounded. 

A serious menace despite those claims of sex with aliens

THE Raelians' sinister tentacles stretch across the Atlantic and into 
Britain, experts say. 

Graham Baldwin, director of Catalyst, a British charity which helps people 
damaged by cults, described the Rael movement as "very dangerous" and with 
huge financial assets, including £15million in one Swiss bank account alone. 

"What is so worrying is that the man behind it believes he is not answerable 
to any rules or rulers," he added. "It's these people who end up doing 
terrible things to their supporters." The organisation, which describes 
itself as "the world's largest UFO related, non-profit organisation" was 
founded by a French racing driver and journalist named Claude Vorilhon, who 
says he had an erotic encounter with aliens in 1973. 

Now calling himself Rael, he lives in Canada and teaches that life on Earth 
was created some 25,000 years ago with DNA imported by aliens. He thinks that 
human cloning is the way to eternal life.

His beliefs, which are big on free sex and spontaneous nudity, have not 
surprisingly drawn about 50,000 members in 85 countries. Most are in Quebec. 

Commentators have noted the high number of attractive people the cult seems 
to attract, usually between the ages of 17 and 28. 

Rael recently began racing cars again, but has denied that the 25 women who 
regularly travel with him to races are a harem. He says they are his public 
relations executives. 

His "religion" has 125 priests and 24 bishops, and Rael lives in a home near 
Montreal which houses UFOland, a theme park. The star exhibit is a full-size 
model of the space ship he says he boarded for his erotic encounter with "the 
eternals". But however absurd the cult may seem, its aim to produce a cloned 
human and its huge resources lend its pronouncements some credibility. 

The scientific arm of the religion is Clonaid, set up to help infertile and 
homosexual couples have children. Valiant Ventures, also based in the 
Bahamas, promises to help parents produce a clone of one of them. A third 
offshoot, Clonapet is offering to recreate dogs and cats and champion race 
horses. 

It is not Rael or his weird beliefs that interest those most concerned about 
the ethics of cloning. They mainly fear the head of his scientific operations 
and a bishop in his church, Dr Brigitte Boisselier. She is unabashed in her 
determination to move the process forward. 

She said recently: "I'm a scientist and very pragmatic even if I do believe 
in little green men." Graham Baldwin said that contacts with people who had 
left the religion found them disturbed by their experience. "The general 
feeling is that he produces a nervous dependency, taking away their freedom." 

He said Rael was dangerous because his claims about meetings with aliens 
lulled authorities across the world into assuming he was just a joke figure. 

"The idea that they will clone a human is very credible because they seem to 
have the ambition and vast amounts of money. The mistake is that people have 
not taken Rael seriously." 

A mad idea whether it fails or succeeds

COMMENTARY BY ANDREW BROWN IT IS quite right that it should be a lunatic cult 
that first announces plans to clone a human baby: the project is moral lunacy 
whether it succeeds or fails. 

What's truly frightening about it is that only the technology is new. The 
practice of producing babies for reasons that have nothing to do with their 
merits as individuals goes back as far as history and continues to this day. 

When Diana Spencer married into the Royal Family, it was clearly understood 
that her duty was to produce an heir. 

The children of such a marriage might be, as we hope all children will be, a 
testimony to their parents' enduring love. But they could just as well be no 
more than a dynastic necessity. 

In the same way, many - perhaps most - children in the poor world are born 
because their parents need help in the fields or care in their old age. 

Only modern, middle-class families suppose that children are normally born 
for their own sake, just as it is only modern people who say: "I would not 
bring a child into a world like this." For most of history there has been no 
choice. 

But the Raelians have a choice; and they are choosing wrongly. 

This is partly a moral argument: children are individuals, who should be 
treasured for their own sakes, and not as substitutes for other children. 

And a cloned child is not a reincarnation or a recreation of the original but 
another unique human. Clones are not the same as each other any more than 
identical twins are, in fact they would be much less like each other than 
identical twins, since not only would they have slightly different DNA, but 
they would also and more importantly have grown in different wombs. 

So the poor misguided woman who has been told that she will get her lost 
child back has been lied to; and this lie will guarantee great suffering for 
other people too, whether or not a child is born at the end of it. 

Cloning is hugely wasteful. Dolly was the only survivor of 347 embryos, many 
of which were aborted in late pregnancy. If this plan goes through, many of 
the surrogate mothers will suffer horrible miscarriages - for nothing but a 
cult leader's megalomania. 

Perhaps the only worse outcome would be for the project to result in two 
babies being born. 

_____________________________________________

Small religious group sees its future in cloning

("Orlando Sentinel," October 10, 2000)

Dressed in white, his thinning hair tied in a bun atop his head, the leader 
of an obscure religious group stood before a smattering of onlookers in a 
Montreal hotel to make what he said was a momentous announcement: His group, 
which believes that human cloning is the key to "eternal life," had found a 
wealthy American couple willing to finance the group`s effort to clone a 
person for the first time.

The leader, a former sportswriter who now calls himself Rael, was flanked by 
his scientific adviser and five young women wearing identical necklaces, part 
of the group`s bevy of 50 would-be surrogate mothers who have volunteered to 
carry cloned human embryos in their wombs. The first to be cloned, Rael said, 
would be the American couple`s child, a 10-month-old girl who recently died 
from a medical accident, whose cells had been preserved.

"We`ve got the funding. We anticipate being able to start in October," said 

Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director for the Raelian religion, which 
claims to have 50,000 members in 85 countries.

The Raelians offered no evidence that they have any of the medical talent 
required to reach their goal, or that their claim was anything more than a 
publicity stunt. Their Sept. 21 announcement went largely unnoticed.

But while no one knows whether this group will really ever try to clone a 
human being, experts familiar with recent scientific advances say there is no 
longer much debate that human cloning can be achieved with existing 
technology. And, in fact, it`s probably a group like the Raelians that would 
be in the best position to pull it off, they said.

That`s because the biggest roadblock to human cloning is not that it requires 
great technical ability -- it almost certainly does not -- but that it will 
take many failed pregnancies to get a single success. That, along with 
society`s queasiness about cloning people, has led most mainstream scientific 
authorities to reject the idea. But a flock of dedicated believers willing to 
tolerate a few dozen miscarriages along the way could probably clone a person 
in less than a year, leading scientists said.

"It`s a numbers game," said George Seidel, a physiologist and cloning expert 
at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "It`s very likely that if you 
did it enough times, you could make it work."

The math is straightforward: One female donor can produce about 20 good eggs 
after a month of hormone treatments. Assume that just five of those eggs can 
be made into healthy cloned embryos, two embryos are transferred to each 
surrogate mother, and one of 100 embryos survives to birth -- all reasonable 
assumptions based on animal data, scientists said. That means 20 human-egg 
donors and 50 surrogate moms would probably be plenty to make a human clone.
  

_____________________________________________

Small religious group sees its future in cloning

("Orlando Sentinel," October 10, 2000)

Dressed in white, his thinning hair tied in a bun atop his head, the leader 
of an obscure religious group stood before a smattering of onlookers in a 
Montreal hotel to make what he said was a momentous announcement: His group, 
which believes that human cloning is the key to "eternal life," had found a 
wealthy American couple willing to finance the group`s effort to clone a 
person for the first time.

The leader, a former sportswriter who now calls himself Rael, was flanked by 
his scientific adviser and five young women wearing identical necklaces, part 
of the group`s bevy of 50 would-be surrogate mothers who have volunteered to 
carry cloned human embryos in their wombs. The first to be cloned, Rael said, 
would be the American couple`s child, a 10-month-old girl who recently died 

from a medical accident, whose cells had been preserved.

"We`ve got the funding. We anticipate being able to start in October," said 
Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director for the Raelian religion, which 
claims to have 50,000 members in 85 countries.

The Raelians offered no evidence that they have any of the medical talent 
required to reach their goal, or that their claim was anything more than a 
publicity stunt. Their Sept. 21 announcement went largely unnoticed.

But while no one knows whether this group will really ever try to clone a 
human being, experts familiar with recent scientific advances say there is no 
longer much debate that human cloning can be achieved with existing 
technology. And, in fact, it`s probably a group like the Raelians that would 
be in the best position to pull it off, they said.

That`s because the biggest roadblock to human cloning is not that it requires 
great technical ability -- it almost certainly does not -- but that it will 
take many failed pregnancies to get a single success. That, along with 
society`s queasiness about cloning people, has led most mainstream scientific 
authorities to reject the idea. But a flock of dedicated believers willing to 
tolerate a few dozen miscarriages along the way could probably clone a person 
in less than a year, leading scientists said.

"It`s a numbers game," said George Seidel, a physiologist and cloning expert 
at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "It`s very likely that if you 
did it enough times, you could make it work."

The math is straightforward: One female donor can produce about 20 good eggs 
after a month of hormone treatments. Assume that just five of those eggs can 
be made into healthy cloned embryos, two embryos are transferred to each 
surrogate mother, and one of 100 embryos survives to birth -- all reasonable 
assumptions based on animal data, scientists said. That means 20 human-egg 
donors and 50 surrogate moms would probably be plenty to make a human clone.

 

_____________________________________________

Rael Announces Demonstration and Call For a Worldwide Boycott of The 
Hilton Hotels By The Raelian Movement

(PRNewswire, Oct. 4, 2000)
  

MIAMI, Oct. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- The following release was issued today by the 
Raelian Religion:  

The Noga-Hilton of Geneva has finally refused to host the Raelian 
International Convention that is to be held October 5-8, 2000 even though 
reservations were made and paid for 3 months ahead of time. 

As a result of this conspicuous religious discrimination, on this coming 
October 7, the Raelian Movement will organize a massive demonstration in 
front of all the Hilton Hotels worldwide and plans on a global boycott of 
this hotel. Other religious minorities are invited to join in this 
demonstration as well as in the boycott. 

This new anti-cult racism, particularly more prevalent in France, is 
unfortunately gaining momentum in Belgium and Switzerland despite a call for 
common sense from the International Community and the American Government. 
The worse is yet to come as Raelians are beginning to receive death threats. 
Many of them have already exhiled to North America where religious freedom is 
not only constitutional but also social. 

A press conference denouncing all these discriminations and proposing 
immediate actions to reverse the process of "Nazification" of Europe will be 
held in Geneva following the International Raelian Convention.  Rael, leader 
of the Raelian Movement, will be present and will expound on all the 
international measures taken to fight this scourge. 

It will be held at the Geneva Warwick Hotel, 14, (Lauzanne) on October 7 at 
4PM. 

_____________________________________________

Cult Researcher wants to clone dead babies
In October French biologist will implant mothers with reproduced embryos

by Jean-Michel Stoullig and Henning Lohse("Die Welt-Berlin," September 6, 
2000)

Washington - Worldwide, the cloning of humans is at least officially taboo, 
but a French woman scientist wants to make a solo try at sweeping through the 
barriers in the USA: in October, announced Brigitte Broisselier, she will 
clone a dead baby. The infant died several days ago in the USA at the age of 
ten months because of a medical error. As a result, the parents asked her to 
"resurrect" their baby, confirmed the 44 year old woman. She has no moral 
objections - Broisselier is a Raelian. 

Behind the Raelian Movement, as abstruse as it is scientific, lurks a sect 
which was founded by Claude Vorilhon (53), who resides in Canada. The former 
sports journalist claims that 27 years ago in France, on the site of an 
extinct volcano, he was confronted by an extraterrestrial who explained to 
him about the "true source" of all life: he said aliens in UFOs landed on the 
earth 25 thousand years ago and created humans and animals out of dead 
material by using cloning technology. Cloning is supposed to make eternal 
life possible for humanity. 

When the Scottish, cloned sheep, Dolly, blinked in the flash bulbs for the 
media three years ago, the sect rejoiced - as far as they were concerned, 
Dolly was living proof of their theory. The Raelians found the Clonaid 
company in the Bahamas for genetic reproduction. According to Vorilhon, the 
"service," never before performed on humans, costs between 340,000 and 
510,000 marks. The sect says it has 50,000 adherents in 50 countries, 
including Switzerland, Belgium, England and Canada. The sect members must pay 
about 5 percent of their income. 

Broisselier, the "scientific director" of the sect company, said they had 
already been contacted by hundreds of people. Most of those asking were 
either infertile, or had lost their child and wanted to have it reproduced. 
That is no problem in a real case. The cells of the baby are available and 
the expenses are covered, "The doctors made a mistake and the parents got a 
lot of money which will help them to resurrect their child," said the 
molecular biologist and doctor of chemistry and physics. They are keeping the 
time and place of the process secret. They will only say that their 
laboratory is located in a country in which cloning humans is permitted. The 
team consists of a genetic technician, two biologists and a doctor who 
specializes in test-tube fertilization. 

David Kirby, genetic researcher at the University of Washington, does not 
believe the operation will be a success. He estimates the chances of success 
at one percent. He said the cloned embryos would probably have to be 
implanted in a number of women because there would be numerous miscarriages. 
Even the cloned sheep Dolly did not come into this world until after hundreds 
of failures. Nevertheless Kirby commented that the technology had improved 
considerably. He said he would "not be surprised if there were a human clone 
in the near future." 

Brigitte Broisselier does no more fear failure than she has ethical 
objections. She assured us that she does not want to produce a monster. 
"Parents have the right to have a child with their own genetics. Imagine the 
joy of a widow who raises a child that resembles her deceased spouse, down to 
the last hair. 

_____________________________________________

Sect leader: Cloning of American baby girl in works

("Canadian Press," January 1, 2000)

'Twenty-seven years ago, when I talked about cloning, they laughed. Now they 
are afraid.'
-- RAEL, spiritual leader of Raelian cult

MONTREAL -- The spiritual leader of the Raelian movement is accustomed to 
ridicule; he is, after all, a former sportswriter best known for his claim 
that he was given a new identity by aliens.

But now that a Raelian-sponsored cloning laboratory somewhere in the United 
States is said to be preparing to clone a 10-month-old American girl, Rael 
(formerly Claude Vorilhon) is generating another reaction.

``Twenty-seven years ago, when I talked about cloning, they laughed. They 
don't any more. Now they are afraid,'' Rael said.

On hand for the rare conference in November given by Rael -- who claims to be 
in regular contact with the gods and is known in the movement as Elohim -- 
were a camera crew from a U.S. television network and a photographer 
preparing for a New York Times Magazine story.

The hedonistic Raelians are said to number about 500,000. The Swiss-based 
movement has a substantial following in Quebec.

In 1997, shortly after Dolly the sheep was cloned, Rael announced in Las 
Vegas the formation of the first human cloning company, Clonaid.

Rael and the firm's director, Brigitte Boisselier, said Clonaid has evolved 
into a viable enterprise that has investors, a staff and a list of about 250 
clients.

Rael said a wealthy American family, whose 10-month-old child died because of 
a hospital error, is providing major financial support for the venture and 
will get the first clone, a genetic duplicate of their late daughter.

The family's contributions include all the money it will get from a 
wrongful-death suit against those responsible for the child's death, Rael 
said. The second human clone will also go to a wealthy family who is 
supplying seed money, he said.

A fund has also been established for legal fees, said Rael, who expects that 
legal challenges will take them to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the cloned daughter will be presented to the world via television before 
the end of 2001, Rael said.

``Public opinion will turn completely [and people] will say this cloning is 
perfect.''

Until he was renamed Rael by the aliens who he says first visited him in 
1973, he was a sportswriter named Claude Vorilhon. 

Rael means ``the messenger,'' and part of the message is that humans were 
created in the image of the Elohim as the result of an intergalactic genetic 
experiment.

Rael said cloning will not only give ``genetic codes a second chance,'' it 
will pave the way to eternal life.

_____________________________________________

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