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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. Source:
http://www.globalchange.com/clonaid.htm |
