A rchive Date
[ 27-12-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Science & Technology ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2002/12/27/8463-cp.html
Chemist promises announcement Friday on human cloning, scientists skeptical
Fri, December 27, 2002
NEW YORK (CP) - A chemist who said last week that her company would soon produce the world's first human clone - a baby girl genetically identical to her 30-year-old mother - has promised an announcement Friday.
A spokeswoman for Brigitte Boisselier and the company, Clonaid, declined to answer directly when asked if they will claim to have produced the world's first cloned baby. But the spokeswoman, Nadine Gary, said Thursday that Boisselier intends to have video equipment at a news briefing in Florida and would have an "independent inspector" take DNA evidence from baby and mother. If the baby is a clone of the mother, the two would be genetically identical.
The French news agency Agence France Presse reported Boisselier said the baby had been born Thursday by cesarean section.
Many scientists are skeptical about Clonaid's ability to accomplish the feat. The company was founded in the Bahamas in 1997 by Claude Vorilhon, a former French journalist and leader of a group called the Raelians. Vorilhon and his followers claim aliens visiting him in the 1970s revealed they had created all life on Earth through genetic engineering.
Cloning produces a new individual using only one person's DNA. The process is technically difficult but conceptually simple. Scientists remove the genetic material from an unfertilized egg, then introduce new DNA from a cell of the animal to be cloned. Under the proper conditions, the egg begins dividing into new cells according to the instructions in the introduced DNA.
Boisselier, who claims two chemistry degrees and previously was marketing director for a chemical company in France, identifies herself as a Raelian "bishop" and said Clonaid retains philosophical but not economic links to the Raelians. She is not a specialist in reproductive medicine.
Boisselier, responding to critics, recently dismissed claims that the sect is dabbling in evil. "This is the fundamental right of everybody to reproduce the way that they want," Boisselier said. "It should be everybody's freedom to choose the way they want to reproduce."
A Canadian woman is scheduled to be among the 20 patients who will try to become pregnant with their clones in January, she said.
Participants include investors who have provided more than $1 million US in funding for laboratories. The entire procedure will be made public in a documentary to be released in the new year, she said.
Boisselier has also got the support of Raelians at the sect's compound, called UFOland, in the southeastern Quebec community of Roxton Falls. "I believe in cloning, it's natural," said one elderly woman."It's the next stage of human evolution."
Human cloning for reproductive purposes is banned in several countries. There is no specific law against it in the United States, but the Food and Drug Administration contends it must approve any human experiments.
Dr. Patricia Baird, who headed the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies in Canada more than a decade ago, has said that cloning cells to produce a live organism or cloning to produce cells is ethically wrong.
"Given what we know about the success rate and what happens in animals, it is absolutely reprehensible, indefensible and arrogant that these people would even try to apply it to humans," Baird has said.
"When we know the likelihood of harm and then to apply this to human beings where the consequences are so harmful I think is indefensible."
Boisselier's comments last week came several weeks after Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori said he had engineered a cloned baby boy who would be born in January.
So far scientists have succeeded in cloning sheep, mice, cows, pigs, goats and cats. Last year, scientists in Massachusetts produced cloned human embryos with the intention of using them as a source of stem cells, but the cloned embryos never grew bigger than six cells.
Many scientists oppose cloning to produce humans, saying it's too risky because of abnormalities seen in cloned animals.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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