-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 th
