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World's Second 'Cloned' Baby Is Born, UFO Cult Says

Reuters
Saturday, January 4, 2003; 5:09 PM

By Eric Onstad

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A UFO cult said on Saturday the world's second cloned baby had been born to a Dutch lesbian, but cloning experts swiftly dismissed the claim as a baseless stunt.

"A baby girl was born yesterday evening. The baby is healthy and the mother too," Bart Overvliet, head of the Raelian movement's Dutch branch, told Reuters by telephone.

The woman was now in the Netherlands with her partner, he said, although he did not know where the birth had actually taken place, or even if it had been in the Netherlands itself.

The birth resulted from a procedure by Clonaid, the cloning firm that said it had organized the birth of the first human clone, named Eve, to a 31-year-old American on December 26.

But Harry Griffin, head of Britain's Roslin Institute which cloned the first adult mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996, said the group had provided no proof that two cloned babies existed.

"There is no reason to believe this is anything other than a long drawn-out publicity stunt," he told Reuters.

Clonaid's claims have sparked widespread skepticism among mainstream scientific experts and the company has yet to provide DNA samples or other evidence to support its assertions.

Severino Antinori, a controversial Italian fertility doctor involved in separate human cloning projects, said he thought the report of the second clone's birth was as fake as the first.

"This news makes me laugh. It's a mystery to me how anybody could believe these people who have no scientific track record. It is an absolute lie," he told Reuters.

BABY SAID TO BE WELL

U.S. Clonaid spokeswoman Nadine Gray told Reuters the second cloned child was born at 2100 GMT but also did not say where in Europe the birth had taken place: "The baby is in good health and it was born by a natural birth," Gray said.

Clonaid is backed by the Raelians, who believe aliens landed on Earth 25,000 years ago and started the human race through cloning. But the French founder of the movement, Claude Vorilhon, who calls himself Rael, said on Friday that Clonaid and the Raelians were "very different" and that he could not personally vouch for the accuracy of Clonaid's claims.

Overvliet, a 45-year-old Amsterdam salesman, said the Dutch woman involved in the latest birth planned to raise the baby with her partner and was not a member of the Raelians herself.

Clonaid chief executive Brigitte Boisselier told Britain's Sky television: "The baby is perfectly healthy, she's doing wonderfully well." Her name has yet to be disclosed.

Asked why the group had not provided promised DNA evidence that the first baby was a clone, she said Eve's parents feared a court would take the child away if they let her be tested.

"We are trying to find a way to have maybe an independent expert who will not be from the U.S., so that if there is a judge asking that person to...tell where those parents are, he will not have to answer," Boisselier said.

Though she announced Eve's birth in Florida, it is not clear where the child was born or where she is now.

Clonaid, which says it has a list of 2,000 people willing to pay $200,000 to have themselves or a loved-one cloned, announced the initial birth on December 27. It says three more cloned babies are to be born by the end of January.

QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY

Vorilhon says the ultimate goal is to make people immortal by having them cloned at the moment of death.

In cloning, the nucleus is removed from an egg cell and replaced with a nucleus from a cell of the animal to be cloned. If this is done at just the right time and in just the right way, the egg cell starts to divide as if it had been fertilized by sperm. The resulting embryo is only an exact genetic duplicate of the mother if the mother's own egg cell was used.

Cattle, mice, sheep and other animals have been cloned with mixed success. Some developed defects later and critics of human cloning say it is unethical to subject a baby to these dangers.

The Vatican called Eve's reported birth "an expression of a brutal mentality lacking all ethical and human consideration."

The Raelians, who claim 55,000 followers, dismiss fears of health problems as propaganda aimed at impeding their progress.

Aliens who created humans and then departed for their own planet have been monitoring mankind's progress, Overvliet said: "They now think we are far enough along in science so we can understand how we were created." (Additional reporting by Peter Graff in London, Estelle Shirbon in Rome and Robert Melnbardis in Montreal)