Last February, when Brigitte Boisselier, a French chemist, heard that Scottish scientists had produced Dolly, a sheep cloned from an adult cell, she was one of the few researchers whom the news did not surprise. A member of a fringe religious organization called the Raelian Movement, Boisselier had expected such a development: the group’s leader, Rael, had predicted it 23 years before. It seems that Rael, a former French sports journalist, received the news of the impending discovery from extraterrestrials. They send him such announcements periodically, since he’s half E.T. himself. According to a Raelian fact sheet (which could also serve as a script for The X-Files), his mother was transported aboard a ufo, where she was inseminated by one of these otherworldly beings. In 1946, Rael was born from this union, and 27 years later he began receiving messages from the distant paternal side of his family. Most of these celebrate science and technology, predicting a future when we Earthlings will rationally understand [our] origins and begin making synthetic people. Cloning human beings, apparently, is one of the steps we must take on this path.
Rael told us this would happen, says Boisselier, so when we heard the news we weren’t shocked; we were organized. Indeed, so organized that one month later—even as medical ethicists, politicians, and pundits debated whether the technique should ever be applied to humans, and President Clinton asked for a moratorium on such research—the Raelians launched a company called Valiant Venture Ltd., the world’s first human cloning firm. Advertised on the Web, Valiant Venture offers a service called Clonaid to help parents who want to have a child cloned from one of them. Boisselier signed on as the firm’s scientific director and is now busy overseeing experiments that she believes will lead to the first cloned human in a mere two years.
We need to do many experiments first with other species to be sure that it can be done without causing any damage, says Boisselier. And we also need to raise more funds. Nevertheless, the company, now 14 months old, is making good progress. As of late February, it had a list of more than 100 people (Raelians and nonbelievers) who would like to be cloned or to have someone they love cloned—for a minimum fee of $200,000. Boisselier claims that her firm’s research is advancing, although she would not say where the studies are taking place or who is doing them, making it impossible to verify her claims. But because the procedure can be performed in a relatively simple, inexpensive laboratory, as other scientists have noted, there is also no reason to doubt that the Raelians are doing exactly what they say: taking the first experimental steps to produce a human clone. We’ve subcontracted the work to labs where it’s legal to do this, Boisselier explains, noting that human cloning is banned in France. To say that human cloning is forbidden won’t stop the science, she says. It’s important that society knows that this is possible, that it can be—and will be—done. . . . In a few years, I expect there’ll be a lot of cloned people, that it will be done everywhere in the world. This is what happens with technological advances.
Boisselier’s outspoken enthusiasm for producing human clones is rare among scientists. Since Dolly’s appearance, only one other researcher—Richard Seed, a Chicago physicist turned biologist—has jumped publicly into human cloning. He held a press conference in early January to say that he intends to open up shop as soon as he raises the funds. Like Boisselier, he has a list of people who want to be cloned (although his is shorter, only four candidates), and he also thinks human cloning can be a reality in a rather short time and with only a few million dollars for start-up costs. But most other researchers are far more cautious, especially since they have yet to clone an adult of any of our closest relatives, other primates. These researchers regard announcements like Seed’s and Boisselier’s as not only premature but off the wall. More than one referred to Seed as a kook, an oddball simply out to make a name for himself. Seed’s announcement that human cloning was part of God’s plan for humankind [to] become one with God did not help that image.
For all their faith in science and their apparently more rigorous approach to cloning, Boisselier and the Raelians are obviously far outside the mainstream. Their offer also plays on the fears of parents, says Mark Sauer, a reproductive endocrinologist at Columbia, since they propose to store the cells of living children. These cells could be used later to produce a clone of the child should the child die. That’s exploitation of the worst kind, says Sauer. It plays on every parent’s fears. And then what about a child who’s produced that way? Will he or she be burdened by the memories of the first child? Sauer adds that he suspects in time, it will be possible to use adult cells to clone someone. But because of the many unanswered questions—both technical and ethical—human cloning has not been endorsed by anyone, and certainly not by those of us working in reproductive medicine. It’s premature to make these kinds of announcements and may lead to unwanted legislation. Indeed, as of late February, California had already banned human cloning, 24 other states were considering such laws, and eight bills were being weighed in Congress. Or cloning may be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has asserted its right to do so.
