-Caveat Lector-
www.saturday.
Saturday Night
March 3, 2001
CLONING AROUND
With their UFO fixation and free-love philosophy, the Raëlians have long
been considered one of Quebec's wackier sects. Now they say they're
about to create the world's first human clone. And they're not joking by
Daniel Sanger, photographs by Jonathan Worth
Christmas day in Hollywood Beach, south Florida -- no snow, of course,
but no sun either. Instead, near-gale-force winds are keeping the
beaches clear, pretty much ensuring that this will be a Christmas not to
remember for the assorted sybarites who have come here from northern
climes.
One group of visitors, however, tucked away in a generic conference
hall, doesn't seem overly disappointed, even if they are notorious for
their pleasure-seeking ways and were lured here by promises of sea, sex,
and sun. ("Bring your suntan cream and your bathing suit!" said their
Web site. "Oh! There is also a nude beach close by . . . good for the
eyes.")
The group, members of a small, Quebec-based sect called the Raëlians,
had their own little party last night, celebrating, in advance, the
December 25 conception -- conception, not birth -- of their leader, a
man known as Claude Vorilhon in his previous careers as a chansonnier,
race-car driver, and journalist, but who changed his name to Raël when
he decided to start his own religion. The party was a relaxed affair and
one in which everyone took time out, in the words of one of Raël's PR
women, for "remembering Jesus, who was a prophet too." Today, it's
down to business with a "personal-growth seminar" entitled "Developing
Ourselves."
But it isn't the subject of the seminar that's generating buzz as the
forty or so assembled wander into the meeting room. Rather, it's the
imminent undertaking of something Raël has been working towards and
preaching about -- in his New Agey, non-preachy way -- for a
quarter-century. (From the time, in fact, that he says he was whisked
away on a UFO from his home in central France and taken to a planet
where he sat down at a table with Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Moses,
Buddha, and thirty-five other prophets from across history, all of them
very much alive and fluent in French.) It's a feat not entirely unlike a
virgin birth. The Raëlians say they are about to clone a human being.
It's a staggering claim, coming as it does from the leader of a
decidedly marginal, arguably wacky religious sect. Indeed, when Raël
first announced, in March, 1997 -- a month after news of the birth of
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, startled
the world -- that he had set up a company called Clonaid which would
help people clone lost loved ones, including pets, it was dismissed
as a joke.
Things have changed since then. A half dozen other species have been
cloned and the expertise is now widely shared (and, in the scientific
scheme of things, not all that complicated). The only serious
impediment is the ethical aversion to creating, in a lab, a human being
who is a genetic replica of another -- and, of course, the laws that
some countries, like Canada, have adopted codifying that aversion. In
the face of scientific ambition, however, that probably won't be enough.
In January, two prominent doctors in the field of assisted reproduction
announced that they, too, have begun a human cloning project. Others are
thought to be doing so in private. Some experts suspect that someone,
somewhere, has already been cloned, in secret.
None of these are as public in their cloning campaign as the Raëlians.
Last summer, they say, a wealthy American couple approached Clonaid,
desperate to have their ten-month-old son cloned. (He had died during a
routine operation to repair a small defect in his heart.) Backed by the
couple's cash, Clonaid reportedly set up a secret lab somewhere in the
U.S. and hired a team of scientists and doctors to begin work. Suddenly,
Raëlian cloning was no longer a droll news item to lighten up a grey
paper. Instead, it was given a more apocalyptic spin: weirdo religious
cult about to do the unspeakable.
No journalists have been taken to the lab or even been told where it is.
The parents of the dead child remain anonymous. Only one member of the
scientific team -- its director, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist with
a specialty in metals and gases, not living cells, who also happens to
be a bishop in the Raëlian church -- has identified herself as part of
the project. So there is widespread skepticism about it.
Yet there are also reasons to believe the Raëlians may be able to pull
it off. For one thing they seem determined, perhaps because for them
cloning is part of a higher calling. The first humans, Raël says, were
manufactured in labs by the scientifically sophisticated aliens who sat
him down at that remarkable table, which makes cloning central to the
sect's creation myth. It is also, Raël says, integral to our survival
both as a species and as individuals -- it's through cloning that
humanity will achieve eternal life.
On a more practical level, the sect has more than enough dedicated
female followers to supply the dozens, even hundreds, of human eggs such
a project would require. Fifty of these women, including Boisselier's
own daughter, Marina, have lined up to serve as the surrogate mothers
for any successfully cloned embryos. And there does seem to be some
scientific team in place. When, in the course of an interview, I told
Boisselier the media might be more credulous if at
least one of the doctors involved went public, she called up and let me
interview a man said to be the nucleus-transfer specialist. At the very
least, he could talk the part (with a German accent to boot). Finally,
the sect could certainly marshal the financial resources to carry out
the project.
"Originally, I thought it would be in vitro-fertilization providers in
Third World countries . . . where the laws are more lax" who would first
clone a human, says Dr. Lee Silver, a bioethicist at Princeton
University and the author of Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and
Cloning Will Transform the American Family. But "now more than ever, I
think that it will be a group like the Raëlians who will do this."
They may, in fact, be much of the way there already. In mid-February,
Boisselier said the scientific team had already been working with human
eggs for two weeks, practising "enucleation" -- removing the nucleus.
Soon, she said, they'd try their hand at the transfer procedure --
taking the nucleus of another cell and inserting it into the enucleated
egg. By early March, if all went well, they'd be ready to begin work in
earnest -- with the preserved cells of the dead child.
All good reason, then, why, down in blowy south Florida a few weeks
earlier, Raël himself was basking in the adoration and awe of his
followers and suggesting to them that Christmas, 2001, might really be
the Christmas to remember. A Christmas where they'd take the first steps
to eternal life. A Christmas where they'd welcome the first radically
"new" human in the history of the species.
The road to human cloning goes back ninety-nine years to when the German
embryologist Hans Spemann made a minuscule noose with a hair from the
head of his infant son. He used the noose to separate the two cells of
an early-stage salamander embryo. The separated cells grew to be two
intact, healthy salamanders, rather than two salamander halves, as many
had expected. The experiment went a long way to proving that every
living cell of an animal contains the genetic blueprint for the entire
creature. Ninety-four years later, in a vastly more complicated
experiment, researchers at an obscure agricultural-research lab in
Scotland cloned Dolly. They removed the nucleus from one of her mammary
cells, injected it into an egg whose nucleus had been removed, and
zapped it with a jolt of electricity to start the magic. Still, the
science has always been simple compared with the moral debate, which
gets tangled up in matters of human vanity, eugenics, and everlasting
life.
Those who understand the science rarely cast the debate in such grand
terms. Both proponents and foes accept that the similarity between a
human clone and its (single) parent would actually be less than that
between identical twins. This has to do with obvious factors -- such as
the different eras and environments in which the two would grow up -- as
well as with more hidden influences, including the mitochrondrial DNA of
the host egg cell and the conditions in the womb, both of which would be
different from those that influenced the development of the
parent. As Princeton's Lee Silver says, "The child's always going to be
a surprise no matter what. No matter how much we know about the genes,
the child is going to come out and be unpredictable." Any narcissist who
clones himself to perpetuate his uniqueness will be disappointed, says
Silver. "He will end up with a baby that will kind of look like he
looked as a baby but who will grow up into a boy that won't listen to
him."
Silver expects that cloning by itself will never become more than a
marginal procedure used in extreme cases, in particular by gay or
sterile couples insistent on a genetic connection to a child. Beyond
such cases, making children by more conventional means will always be
easier and less costly. Like most supporters of cloning, Silver invokes
the name of Louise Joy Brown, the world's first test-tube baby. Her
birth in 1978 set off much gloomy prognosticating about baby factories
and a Brave New World. Now, 20,000 test-tube babies later, in vitro
fertilization (ivf) and other forms of assisted reproduction are
commonplace and uncontroversial.
But there are those who see cloning as a step over the line. No one
seriously suggests that a cloned baby would be any less a person than a
normal baby, lacking a soul, conscience, or one of the other
indefinables that make us human. The child would, however, come with a
whole raft of expectations that could pose an unbearable psychological
burden. A visit to any Internet chat site dedicated to cloning gives an
idea of what might be in store. Like the wealthy patrons of the
Raëlians, those interested in cloning someone are almost invariably
trying to fill a gap. Often it's been left by the untimely death of a
child; sometimes it's a parent or other loved one. On occasion, it is a
public figure. "Why not have [the first human] clone be John Lennon?"
said a recent posting on one such site. "Apparently some of his tissue
still exists." The clone, it's clear, would be his or her own person --
but expected to be someone else as well.
There are larger, longer-range concerns. Louise Brown was still the
result of a sperm and an egg from two different people magically
creating someone else entirely different. The first clone won't be.
Rather, the baby will be the genetic replica of another person -- a
"latter-born twin" in the euphemistic parlance of cloning advocates.
"There is a difference in kind. Homo sapiens does not reproduce
asexually," says Dalhousie University bioethicist Dr. Françoise Baylis.
"This is not just another reproductive technology." The debate should
not focus on reproductive freedom, Baylis adds, but on what it might
mean for humanity several generations down the line. "There are huge,
huge eugenic implications," she says. "We're basically saying, 'We're
the creator.' " Baylis, like many bioethicists, including Lee Silver, is
concerned more with the possibility of "genetic enhancement" than with
simple cloning. "Cloning will not be used in isolation. I won't just
clone me. I will clone me with a little less weight and maybe a
different colour hair and without all the other little things a person
feels might have held them back."
In this way, most of the science fiction has it wrong: it's not the
clones we should be worried about, it's the people doing the cloning.
Among the countless new religions that have prospered in Quebec since
the decline of the Catholic Church in the 1960s, the Raëlians have long
been among the most visible, not to mention risible. Only about 10
percent of the sect's 50,000 members live in the province, but it is
still headquarters for the group and the home of Raël. Without any
financial, brainwashing, or sexual scandals to probe -- the common
currency of cult coverage -- the Quebec media have instead concentrated
on ridicule. Attending one of the Raëlians' many public events, it's
obvious why.
December 13 was the day after Montreal's first big snowfall of the year
and the twenty-seventh anniversary of Raël's first contact by aliens.
That's enough to make it a holy day. The celebration is being held at a
low-rent reception hall facing the autoroute that separates Old Montreal
from the rest of downtown. There are about seventy-five people milling
about when I walk in, from well-groomed men in suits to funky lower St.
Laurent types, from older women you might find at a church
bazaar to gaudy, big-haired women and granola hippies. What unites this
crowd is that almost everyone is wearing a large pendant of a swirl
inside a Star of David and about half the women also sport a small
feather around their necks, the sign of the Angels, a secretive sub-sect
of women within the Raëlian movement. While a few men prepare the stage
area, another hangs a huge silk painting that is very Raëlian in style
and subject. All swirls and curving brush strokes, it's a naked woman,
half sitting, half lying, a hand suggestively pushing back her hair. The
Raëlians, after all, are best known for their advocacy of sex of all
types -- straight, gay, monogamous, group, public, you name it. It's a
major drawing card for the curious and no doubt the reason many of those
here today first checked out the movement.
Marina Cocolios, Brigitte Boisselier's daughter and one of the
surrogate-mother candidates, is the master of ceremonies. She provides a
quick preview of the afternoon's events, then introduces "a scientist"
-- she doesn't specify what kind -- whose job it is to explain exactly
what will happen during the main event of the afternoon, "the
transmission."
His role, I come to realize, is essential. Raëlianism calls itself "an
atheistic religion" and claims its special achievement is to reconcile
the often contrary worlds of science and spirituality. For the Raëlians,
God is not some mystical force but rather a group of scientists with a
25,000-year head start on us. In this way, Raël says, the Hebrew word
for God -- Elohim -- has always been mistranslated. In reality, he
says, it means "those who come from the sky." In Raël's circular vision,
we will join -- in a sense, become -- our creators, the Elohim, if we
pursue cloning and space travel. Eternal life is possible, not through
anything as quaint as prayer or good works but through science --
starting with cloning.
Marina's scientist explains that, like body odour, we all emit our DNA.
The Elohim, it seems, periodically, and invisibly, fly low over earth
and suck up the cellular plans of the righteous. December 13 is one of
four days during the year when the Elohim are receiving. "It's like your
TV or radio picking up a signal," says the scientist. The Elohim then
keep the believers' genetic codes on file, ready to recreate them if
they are deserving.
When it's three o'clock and time for the transmission, Marina introduces
Lear. He's Raël's second-in-command, a post I don't think he got simply
by taking Raël's name and spelling it backwards. New members walk up to
Lear and stand facing him. He dips his hands in a bowl of water, places
one hand on the new member's forehead, the other on the back of the
neck. Then he closes his eyes, tenses his whole body and looks
heavenward -- or rather Elohim-ward -- for a few
seconds. That's it.
After three people have been "transmitted," Lear takes the mike. He
tells us that twenty-two new Raëlians have been transmitted earlier that
day in Europe and fifty-five in Asia. In the U.S., well, the Elohim are
just flying over now. Everyone claps. He then asks if there are any
others who are interested in being baptized. A few people look at me but
I remain seated. Anyone wanting to get married? No takers. Any divorces
to oversee?
At first I think he's joking, but two people on different sides of the
room stand. Once they are beside Lear, they hug and stand with their
arms around each other. Lear asks them how long they've been together.
"Eight years," says the man. "Seven," corrects the woman. "Whatever,"
says Lear. "A while." Then he delivers a poignant, off-the-cuff speech
about how the couple have had a lot of joy and should treasure that; how
each will always carry within them a little of the other and how they
should respect and nurture that. The couple embrace and part, going off
to their new partners who wait, at either end of the front rows of
chairs, smiling.
Then it's time to talk money. A man in a jacket and tie tells us that
Raël's love of car racing is a very good way to get the Raëlian message
of peace, sex, world government, euthanasia, meditation, arts
appreciation, and various other values -- some prosaic, some absurd --
out into the wider world. But car racing is expensive, the man says, and
we should reach into our wallets to help out. Donors of $100 will get a
poster of Raël in his race car; donors of $500 will get the
same poster, signed and laminated; donors of $1,000 will get the poster,
signed and professionally framed. He is followed by another woman,
raising funds for a present for Raël.
Without question, Raëlians make themselves large targets -- even without
quoting from Raël's unintentionally comical writings (in particular, his
account of "the most unforgettable bath that I have ever had" in the
company of six perfect female robots), or citing his earnest ambition to
turn a substantial chunk of Jerusalem's Old City into a UFO landing pad,
or mentioning Lana St-Cyr, the transvestite
stripper who was one of the church's top proselytizers in the 1980s and
is largely responsible for the disproportionate number of strippers
among the faithful.
Yet the Raëlian church clearly gives meaning, structure, and community
to the lives of its followers while embracing differences, and it
encourages tolerance, whether it be religious, cultural, ethnic, or
sexual. In a province that has had its share of dangerous cult activity,
most famously the Solar Temple suicides of 1994 and 1997, these
qualities do not go unappreciated. Susan Palmer, who teaches
religion at Concordia University and Dawson College and has written
extensively on the Raëlians, says Raël "is extremely creative when it
comes to theology. He's an innovator, and a religious genius." Palmer
feels Raëlians -- and all new religions -- also suffer from a double
standard. "We live in a society where it's considered unacceptable to be
intolerant but at the same time our attitudes to new religions
and 'cults' are extremely intolerant," she says. "All religions started
out as cults. A cult is a baby religion that is just not toilet
trained, that is still throwing up on people's carpets."
Mike Kropveld, who has been running the resource centre Info-Cult for
twenty years, says Raël is a harmless self-promoter with a good eye for
publicity stunts: handing out condoms in front of Catholic high schools
when washroom dispensers were banned in 1992; holding a conference on
masturbation in 1993; submitting position papers to pretty much every
provincial-government commission. And then there's the public face of
Raëlianism. "You've got aliens, you have sex, you have beautiful women,"
says Kropveld. "Raël is no fool and he is very good at getting people to
talk about him."
Thomas, who sits beside me at the transmission, is a good example of the
kind of Raëlian few talk about. A small-town businessman, he tells me
it's the twenty-second anniversary of his own baptism but he's anything
but a proselytizer. Every religion is valid, he says in a rural
Québécois accent, none necessarily more valid than the rest. "I was
raised a Catholic," he says, "way back when. Every time you set a foot
wrong they told you you'd burn in hell forever. I have no time for that.
It's not what you believe in that will get you to paradise. What's
important is the good you do on earth."
UFOland is the closest thing the Raëlians have to a holy site. It's an
odd building, half theme park, half condo complex, made of straw covered
with a layer of concrete, midway between Montreal and Quebec City.
Summertime visitors fall into two distinct camps: tourists who pay ten
dollars to walk around low-budget displays about UFOs and DNA; and
Raëlians making the pilgrimage to seminars in "sensual meditation" and
for Raël's birthday bash. (There is also a small third group which
attends all Raëlian functions: men lured by expectations of easy and
abundant sex. A friend spent a frustrated year on the periphery of the
movement: "My ego and libido were shattered when I realized that there
was a hierarchy of buffoonery, that I would have to spend a very long
time climbing before anyone would get horizontal with me.")
In the winter, UFOland is mostly deserted, which is just how Brigitte
Boisselier likes it these days. Raël put her in charge of Clonaid
shortly after its founding, and until this past fall it didn't take up
much of her time. But then the couple who lost their baby came forward
-- "We were the last people they came to because, of course, we are a
strange religion to them" -- and Boisselier went into high gear.
Setting up a lab and doing endless media, combined with her real job of
teaching chemistry at Hamilton College in upstate New York, is
exhausting. Boisselier retreats here to recharge.
After suggesting in late November that she might allow me a visit to the
secret lab, by early January I have to be satisfied with a description
of it. (There are, she explains, security concerns: if abortion clinics
get blown up in the U.S., anything is possible for a lab cloning the
first human.)
The lab, she says, is in a building not intended to be used for lab
work, in a state where cloning is not illegal. There are two main rooms.
One is to be used for the harvesting of eggs from the surrogate mothers
and the implantation of viable embryos. The other is the "clean" room
where the cloning gets done. It contains the microscopes with the
micro-manipulator -- the tool that will help open up the
cells and delicately extract and transfer the nuclei -- as well as a
carbon dioxide incubator for growing cells and a polymerase
chain-reaction machine for DNA testing. It all came cheap, Boisselier
says, because over-supply in the in vitro market means equipment is
being sold off at a discount. "All together it cost about one hundred
thousand dollars."
Raël once said cloning a human was so simple, it could be done "by a
Japanese journalist in his kitchen." Boisselier isn't so cavalier but is
still very confident. Even if it took 277 manipulated eggs to produce
Dolly and sixty-eight for Starbuck II, a prize bull cloned last fall in
St-Hyacinthe, just fifty kilometres down the road from
UFOland, she expects a success rate closer to that of ivf clinics -- 30
percent or so. Her three scientists -- a nucleus-transfer specialist, a
biochemist, and a medical doctor specializing in in vitro fertilization
-- may never have been involved in a cloning project before, but
apparently that isn't a big hurdle. "The information is all out there
and it's only a question of a little practice to get it right," said the
purported nucleus-transfer specialist Boisselier had me speak with.
They will be methodical. First, Boisselier says, they will do a test run
with the nuclei of cells from someone other than the deceased baby. Once
they're convinced they have the technique down and the embryos are
viable, they'll destroy them and begin working with the cells of the
wealthy couple's dead child.
They have an abundance, says Boisselier. "Thymus cells, skin cells. They
even took cells from the fingernails."
Once they have the first healthy baby, Boisselier says, doubts about the
technology will fall away and the demand for Clonaid's services --
already strong -- will turn into a deluge. "Most of the customers that
we have don't want to be first. They don't want the publicity and they
still fear for that first child -- will that first child be okay? But we
have hundreds who are waiting to be second."
It all sounds too easy, and true to form, Boisselier plays down any
fears about the abnormalities or deformities which have mysteriously
plagued cloned animals. (Some researchers say that the incidence of
congenital defects among cloned animals is ten or fifteen times higher
than in natural births.) Anyway, she says, her scientists will do all
the diagnostic examinations possible to screen out any defects before
the implantation of the embryos. Once the clone is in the womb, further
tests will be carried out. If the fetus isn't completely healthy,
abortion looms.
Boisselier's discourse can be cold and clinical, at odds with her quiet
voice and shy gentleness. But then she is a scientist, after all, one
with two Ph.D.s, who found the whole idea of Raëlianism a hoot until she
went to a three-day symposium in 1993. There she found an explanation
for the origins of life that satisfied her scientific and spiritual
misgivings. It cost her a good job, her marriage, and almost her
children, but gave her a purpose, she says.
Now, her daughter Marina Cocolios, our master of ceremonies at the
transmission, a fine-arts student at Montreal's Concordia University,
has signed on. Boisselier says she considered contributing her own eggs
for cloning but decided against it when she heard that the hormones to
induce super-ovulation "are not that easy." Still, she's not worried
about her daughter: "Marina is well prepared and she knows what she is
doing."
I meet Marina at a second cup on St. Denis Street. I buy her a big slice
of chocolatey cake and she swipes a container of juice. The theft is
unintentional, I think, a function of her half-regal, half-flaky
character. When I ask her her age, she cocks her head and looks
genuinely confused. "Twenty-one or maybe twenty-two," she answers.
Marina says she's always dreamed of being pregnant and giving birth but
at this stage in her life, "I don't have time to raise a child. It's a
twenty-year commitment and these days I don't even have time to sleep as
it is." So, in a way, it's a win-win situation for her and the parents
of the dead child, whom she says she has met and wants to help out.
There is, she insists, no pressure from her mother. Any other reasons?
Well, she does want to do her bit for "a giant step in science."
Needless to say, others aren't so keen. "I'm as concerned as any other
father would be," says Panos Cocolios, from Paris. Cocolios says he
doesn't know much about the Raëlians or their cloning project. His
ex-wife, "is a competent scientist. . . . But even if one is intelligent
and competent one needs the resources," he says. He's worried that
Marina won't find carrying the child and then parting with it as easy as
she thinks she will. "I permit myself to doubt her
conviction," he says carefully. About cloning in general, he's a
scientist and is all for progress but would prefer that monumental steps
be taken by the right people, after due deliberation. "I wouldn't put
myself in that position in front of Mother Nature," he says. "I'm much
more humble."
Even among cloning's most fervent proponents there is unease about the
Raëlians' project. Randolfe Wicker, founder of the Human Cloning
Foundation, the highest-profile cloning lobby group, calls the Raëlians
"the sweetest, nicest people. They're a bunch of leftover hippies who
didn't use drugs." Still, he thinks they could do his cause great
damage, "even set it back twenty or thirty years" if there was a
problem with the pregnancy or the child. Wicker is more comfortable
with the cloning project of two scientists, Dr. Severino Antinori and
Dr. Panos Zavos, which was announced in Kentucky at the end of January.
Their facility, to be set up in an undisclosed country, will offer
cloning to infertile couples. In an interview, Zavos professes ignorance
about the Raëlians and wishes them well in their project. But his
bonhomie strikes a disingenuous note, as does his rationale
for going ahead with human cloning now: to beat the "clandestine" and
marginal groups to the punch. "This is a duty that we have," he says.
There are those who aren't really worried about the Raëlian project, if
only because they see it as a charade to grab attention. They believe
the secrecy is simply a ploy to disguise the fact that there is no dead
baby, no lab, no scientific team. Lawrence Smith, who worked with Ian
Wilmut to clone Dolly and later went on to clone Starbuck II, thinks
that at best the Raëlians are absurdly optimistic. Any such project
requires a lot of trial and error. It's true Starbuck II only required
sixty-eight eggs, "but I've been doing cloning for ten years now and
have been through thousands of eggs," he says. The Raëlians, he is
convinced, are "trying to advertise their religion. . . . I really think
that it is more a propaganda exercise."
Raël doesn't deny there is a large PR component. "It's true that in
trying to clone we are getting people talking," he says. "But in
succeeding we'll get even more people talking. The day there is a family
with their little cloned baby on television, it will be the most
fantastic way to get on cnn, on Larry King, and in all the media
of the world." And that, he says, would be just the beginning.
Raël's grand designs become clear down in Florida, on Christmas Day,
when I visit him at the home of one of his followers. I'm led into a
living room with thick carpeting and leather furniture, dominated by a
large photograph of Raël. Around the room are a dozen or so Raëlians,
all smiling except for the one behind a video camera. In a kind but firm
voice, Raël's host explains that these people will sit in on the
interview and it will all be recorded. Before I can object, Raël
appears, all smiles.
Raël moved to Quebec from France in the mid-1990s -- he's vague on the
year -- when, in the wake of the Solar Temple suicides, anti-cult
feeling reached a fever pitch in Europe. "In Canada there's a little bit
of discrimination towards new religions, but for us it is paradise," he
says.
Raël says he came up with the idea for Clonaid shortly after the
announcement of Dolly's birth while doing one of his favourite things:
driving. "I heard the pope on the radio. He said he was against cloning
and I thought, 'Okay, he's against it, so we'll start a company to do
human cloning.' Because everything he is against we are for. Everything.
Contraception. Homosexuality. Divorce. All the values we
espouse, he opposes." Almost as an afterthought, Raël adds: "But, of
course, I was speaking about cloning twenty-seven years ago."
Even if the cloning project is the culmination of a three-decades-long
dream, Raël doesn't seem to be too excited about it. His eye is on the
long term, and the cloning of the baby boy is to Raël's project what the
Apollo 11 moon landing was to space travel at the speed of light. A
crude if essential start.
"The cloning of a baby is really not very interesting. It's just the
first step. The next step is discovering what the Elohim call the
'accelerated-growth process.' That is, being capable of directly cloning
an adult from one of our cells. That is interesting." Raël continues
talking as I study his face, looking for a change in
expression, a twitch, anything that might hint he's joking, lying, or
just plain crazy. Nothing. "I saw it, with my eyes, on the planet of the
Elohim. They took a cell, put it in a machine just like an aquarium and,
then and there, there was an adult body that came out with no
personality. Like a blank tape.
"The third step, the most interesting, is being studied now in Japan" --
home, incidentally, to more Raëlians than any other country -- "where
scientists are trying now to transfer our memories, our personalities,
into a computer. If we're able to do that, then after death we'd be able
to continue to exist in the memory of a computer. We would be ourselves
in a computer with a little camera, a microphone."
Ultimately, of course, we'd be able to download our personalities, our
memories, our selves into new bodies. "That is eternal life. That is
what interests me. Cloning a baby is not that interesting."
Raël is fifty-four now, and while he's trim and fit and relaxed, and his
wife is barely half his age, he often talks about not being young any
more. His hair, now worn in a tight little topknot, is a far cry from
the flowing mane of only a decade or so ago. Death occasionally comes
to mind. When he thinks of the alternative -- eternal oblivion --
waiting things out as a few terabytes of zeros and ones, wouldn't be
bad, he says. But for the time being, he maintains he has absolutely no
interest in being cloned.
It's an obvious question. As Raël freely admits, a baby who died
tragically is a politically savvy choice for Human Clone version 1.0 --
much smarter than, say, a creaky old billionaire or the leader of a
pretty weird religion. Still, Raël is adamant that he's not among those
waiting to be second. Even if his project succeeds and, as he expects,
cloning becomes as accepted as in vitro fertilization, he won't be
cloning himself. "When we've discovered the accelerated-growth process
and the transfer, then yes," he says. "If not, no. I already have two
children and I'm not interested in another -- even if it is myself."
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
