The Vast Empire's Communications Network
  Lounge COMNET
  Human Cloning In Full Swin

Post New Topic  
profile | register | preferences | faq | search

UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! next newest topic | next oldest topic
Author Topic:   Human Cloning In Full Swin
Spartacus
Citizen

Posts: 189
Registered: Sep 2000

posted November 12, 2000 05:39 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Spartacus   Click Here to Email Spartacus        Reply w/Quote
'Aliens' cult about to clone dead baby girl
Lois Rogers, Medical Correspondent
Source: The Sunday Times

A COMPANY run by a bizarre cult is to start work this week on creating the world's first cloned human baby. It is intended to be a genetic copy of a 10-month-old girl who died in February.
The project is being carried out in a secret laboratory which is believed to be in the American desert state of Nevada. The scientists involved hope their baby will be born towards the end of next year.

The company is called Clonaid and is run by a cult that believes humans originated from aliens. It has been created to purchase surplus human egg "envelope" cells from infertility laboratories. A waiting list of people who want to be cloned has been started.

The first attempt will be made using the cells of a baby who died in America earlier this year. Her parents have put �300,000 into the project to recreate their daughter. Five British couples, including two pairs of homosexual men, have asked to go on the waiting list.

Among those who have ex-pressed an interest in cloning are Peter and Ildiko Blackburn, both computer consultants from Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, who have undergone years of unsuccessful infertility treatment. This weekend, they de-clined to discuss whether they were involved with Clonaid.

The company, registered in the Bahamas, where organisations do not have to reveal their accounts, was founded by the Raelian movement, a religious cult which claims to have more than 50,000 members in 85 countries.

Boisselier: after 'eternal life'
The cloning initiative is being led by Brigitte Boisselier, 44, a French-born biochemist who spent part of her studies at the respected Insead business school outside Paris, where the Tory leader William Hague was a student.

Boisselier, a divorced mother-of-three who is the Raelians' scientific director and is based in New York state, said: "We are about to start the process in animals to check that our systems work, and by January we will move to human cells. The first pregnancies will hopefully begin in February. For us the purpose of this project is philosophical, to create eternal life."

The Raelians plan to use the same basic technique that created Dolly, the world's first cloned animal, in Scotland four years ago. This involves removing the nucleus from a human egg cell, then inserting the nucleus from a mature cell.

Theoretically, passing an electric current through the newly reconstituted cell causes it to revert to an embryonic state and begin developing as a baby, genetically identical to the donor of the nucleus.

Dolly was the sole survivor of 347 embryos. Boisselier acknowledges that there will be a high miscarriage rate, but says improved cell manipulation methods which have been developed by her four-strong scientific team will be much less wasteful of human eggs.

More than 50 volunteer surrogate mothers, including Boisselier's oldest child, Marina Cocolios, have been recruited to carry the first cloned pregnancies. Cocolios, 22, who moved with her mother from Versailles in France, is now in the final year of a fine arts degree in Montreal, Canada.

"I volunteered for this a year ago, my mother never pushed me," she said.

Raelians believe humans are all cloned from a group of alien scientists from another planet. This information is said to have been passed on, in a 1973 visitation, to Claude Vorilhon. A former sports journalist, he moved from France to Quebec, changed his name to Rael and founded the cult. Apart from cloning, the main preoccupation of Raelians is the creation of an embassy to welcome aliens arriving on Earth.

Unlike Britain, America has no legal ban on cloning, but research has been hampered by a ban on the use of public funds. The country's Food and Drug Administration is monitoring the Raelian initiative.

There is no doubt that the Raelians are deadly serious and their project has already caused outrage in Las Vegas. A spokesman for Harry Reid, a Democratic senator for Nevada, said he had received letters of protest - but did not know where the laboratory was.

Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly, condemned the project as "absolutely criminal". Tony Perry, a leading British-born cloning expert at Rockefeller University in New York, said it was "morally repugnant" to try to clone humans when animal experiments were producing clones with high levels of defects.

While some experts doubt the Raelians have the expertise to achieve success, others say it is simply a question of mathematical probability: 20 egg donors and 50 surrogate mothers would probably be enough to make a human clone.

Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, director of reproductive medicine and infertility at St Bartholemew's and the Royal London hospitals, said: "If the research were not so heavily regulated, production of a human clone could be no more than one to three years away.

"For some people, producing a child identical to one who has died could be quite reasonable, but in addition to that, cloning technology will provide human spare parts and teach us about the genetic and environmental influences on disease. It will have very major benefits."

Additional reporting: John Elliott

One day, it will be us "normals" who are out of place :P Perhaps they will clone Gene Tierney somehow . . . one day . . .


[This message has been edited by Spartacus (edited November 12, 2000).]

IP: 24.237.58.18

Schnapps
Citizen

Posts: 72
Registered: Sep 2000

posted November 12, 2000 04:32 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Schnapps   Click Here to Email Schnapps        Reply w/Quote
And does this mean that when I'm rich I can have the cast of The Bill ( www.thebill.com ) cloned for me as playthings? Finally, I have a new dream!

IP: 62.254.32.

All times are ET (US)

next newest topic | next oldest topic

Administrative Options: Close Topic | Archive/Move | Delete Topic
Post New Topic  
Hop to:

Contact Us | http://www.vastempire.com/


Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.45c