NEW YORK – A chemist who said last week her company would soon produce the first human clone ﾗ an infant girl genetically identical to her 30-year-old mother ﾗ prepared an announcement on the effort even as scientists remain skeptical about the feat.
A spokeswoman for Brigitte Boisselier and the company, Clonaid, declined to answer directly when asked if they will claim at a briefing Friday to have produced the world’s first cloned baby.
But the spokeswoman, Nadine Gary, said Thursday that Boisselier intends to have video equipment at the news conference in Florida, and would have an “independent inspector” take DNA evidence from baby and mother. If the baby was a clone of the mother, the two would be genetically identical.
Many scientists are skeptical about Clonaid’s ability to accomplish the cloning. 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.
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 (news – web sites) contends it must approve any human experiments in this country. Boisselier would not say where Clonaid has been carrying out its experiments. Bush administration officials said in Washington on Thursday they were aware of rumors of an announcement but had no plans to comment on the matter until after the details were known.
In Rome, fertility doctor Severino Antinori, who said weeks ago he had engineered a cloned baby boy who would be born in January, dismissed Clonaid’s claims and said the group has no scientific credibility.
The news “makes me laugh and at the same time disconcerts me, because it creates confusion between those who make serious scientific research” and those who don’t, Antinori said.
“We keep up our scientific work, without making announcements,” he added. “I don’t take part in this … race.”
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.
By Malcolm Ritter, AP Science Writer
