Clonaid claims birth of first
5 cloned babies
Clonaid announced
birth of "first human clone" on December 26th 2002.
Eve was born by caesarean section after being created by Clonaid
using a technique similar to that used to
clone Dolly the sheep. Clonaid
said they had four other mothers expecting to give birth to clones
soon and announced a second birth to a Dutch lesbian woman early
in January 2003 and a third to a Japanese couple who "cloned
their dead son killed in an accident", plus two others in
late January. All five babies were said to be well but with no
independent verification whatsoever, doubts increased by the day.
After promising immediate genetic testing on Eve
and others by independent scientists, Clonaid
then claimed that lawsuits launched in the US and the Netherlands
were making testing impossible because the courts were likely
to try and identify the children and take them into care. This
increased scepticism around the world that Clonaid
was involved in a major fraud, with the aim of getting more couples
to part with large sums of money. In early February they promised
testing of the Japanese baby was under way. By early March there
was still silence. Sadly another explanation could be that apparently
healthy cloned babies have rapidly developed major heath problems
(as often happens in animals), or even died.
However one thing is clear: it could only be a matter
of time before some team or other can prove that they have won
the global human cloning race.
Clonaid claims
they carried out 3,000 trials using cow eggs and human cells to
form dividing embryos which were then destroyed - in a similar
process to that conducted by Jose
Cibelli at Advanced Cell Technology Massachusetts some years
ago. Clonaid also say they
fused over two hundred human eggs with adult cells in order to
get just 10 which appeared normal, of which 5 implanted successfully.
The worrying thing about such a claim is the mystery of the missing
"monster" babies: the ones so malformed that they were
destroyed in the womb, aborted or which died after premature births.
These are the kinds of things we see in animal cloning and there
is a disturbing silence from Clonaid.
There are also worries that any child created may
age prematurely and die young as Dolly
the sheep did.
While many may doubt Clonaid's
capabilities, other human cloning organisations are reporting
spectacular progress. For example Lu Guangxiu's team in Changsha
China announced in January 2003 that they had also successfully
grown 80 human clones, four of them to balls of hundreds of cells,
the stage when IVF embryos
are usually implanted.
See human cloning news for
more on Clonaid
Old report: A secret human cloning laboratory run
by Clonaid is said to be based in the Nevada desert, with the
first human cloned baby expected to be born in 2001. The
plan is that the human cloning experiment will produce a replacement
copy of a 10 month old girl who died last year.
Clonaid says five British couples, including two
pairs of homosexual men have asked to be cloned. Peter and
Ildako Blackburn, computer consultants from Huntingdon Cambrisdgeshire
UK have expressed an interest in human cloning as an alternative
infertility treatment but will not say if they are in touch with
Clonaid. (Source Sunday Times 5 November 2000)
Clonaid is
registered in the Bahamas and was founded by the Raelian movement
who claim more than 50,000 members in 85 countries. Brigitte
Boiselier is a 44 year old French biochemist who often speaks
for Clonaid as scientific
director. (Some spell her name incorrectly as Boisellier)
She says that Clonaid will
shift from animal cloning to human cloning experiments in January
2001, hoping for the first human cloning pregnancies by February.
More than 50 surrogate mothers have been selected
to carry the human cloned foetuses throughout pregnancy, including
Brigitte Boisellier's own 22 year old daughter, Marina Cocolios.
Raelians believe that humans are all cloned from
alien scientists who visited earth. The movement was started
by Claude Vorilhorn, following a spiritual experience in 1973.
He changed his name to Rael and founded the cult.
America has no laws preventing human cloning research,
unlike the UK, although no public funding is available.
