Firm Says It Created First Human Clone

A member of a religious movement that claims space aliens created life on Earth announced Friday that her company had produced the first human clone, but provided no scientific proof.

The news prompted widespread skepticism and criticism, but experts in reproductive science did not wholly reject the possibility that the group could have done as it claimed.

Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist, said a 7-pound girl was born by Caesarean section Thursday to a 31-year-old American woman in an unspecified country. The scientists nicknamed the girl “Eve.”

The mother, whose husband is infertile, supposedly donated DNA from her own skin cells to make her daughter a genetic twin of herself.

“The baby is very healthy,” Boisselier, who is scientific director of Clonaid, the company that claims to have made medical history, told a news conference at a beachfront hotel. “The parents are happy. I hope that you remember them when you talk about this baby -- not like a monster, like the results of something that is disgusting.”

Boisselier declined to divulge where Clonaid is conducting its experiments, saying only that Eve “was born yesterday at 11:55 a.m. in the country where she was born.” A U.S. Food and Drug Administration official in Washington said the agency would investigate whether U.S. laws regulating experiments on humans had been broken.

Regardless of whether the infant is a clone, the report of her birth reactivated a national debate about the morality and desirability of exploiting scientific discoveries to create human beings, with religious groups, scientists, ethicists, talk show hosts and the White House all weighing in.

President Bush “believes, like most Americans, that human cloning is deeply troubling,” said deputy White House press secretary Scott McClellan, reacting to Clonaid’s claims. “And he strongly supports legislation banning all human cloning.”

At her news conference, Boisselier didn’t identify Eve’s mother, provide a photograph of the newborn or offer any other proof to back up her claim, but said results of a DNA test, showing the daughter to be a genetic match of her mother, would be available within nine days.

“You can still go back to your office and treat me as a fraud,” she told the journalists, many of whom were overtly dubious. “You have one week to do that.”

Scientists and infertility doctors called the news far-fetched and disgusting.

“What a sad day for science,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, a vice president of Advanced Cell Technology, a Worcester, Mass., company researching cloning for medical and agricultural purposes. “What they’ve done is both appalling and irresponsible, and whether or not it’s true they’ve done a tremendous disservice to all of us in the scientific community.”

For a report of this magnitude, one needs a high standard of proof, said Hank Greely, professor of law and a bioethicist at Stanford University.

“I’m concerned about science announced by press conference by a religious cult,” Greely said.

Still, Lanza said, it was too early to declare Boisselier’s announcement a hoax. “I don’t think it’s advisable to dismiss these claims,” he said. “Someone will succeed eventually.”

Some researchers expressed concern that the sensational announcement from a group so far from the scientific mainstream -- and linked to a religion believing in flying saucers -- might further ensnare a branch of medical research that is already controversial.

Many scientists wish to clone human embryos not to produce babies, but to acquire stem cells for medical purposes. They hope one day to produce genetically matched cells for Alzheimer’s patients, heart attack victims and other people whose body tissues have stopped functioning normally.

“The backlash could cripple an area of medical research that could serve millions of people,” Lanza said.

Steps should be made to ban reproductive cloning while leaving the door open for therapeutic cloning, Lanza and other scientists said.

So far, however, legislation to outlaw reproductive cloning has stalled because members of Congress cannot agree whether to ban both types of cloning.

To prove that the baby is a clone of its mother, one would have to take DNA samples of both, then compare the DNA structure of both samples at many sites to ensure that they are perfect matches.

Those taking the samples and performing the analyses should be independent scientists who were not chosen by Clonaid, scientists widely agreed.

Boisselier said she had arranged for former ABC News science editor Michael Guillen to verify Clonaid’s claim. Guillen -- a UCLA graduate and instructor of physics and mathematics at Harvard -- told the news conference he was searching for well-known experts in genetics to test DNA samples from the mother and child, and was not being paid by Clonaid.

Clonaid, which purports to be the world’s “first cloning company,” was started five years ago in the Bahamas. Its founder is former French sports journalist Claude Vorilhon, leader of a religious group known as the Raelians who now calls himself the prophet Rael. In the 1970s, Raelians believe, a green-skinned extraterrestrial in a UFO visited Vorilhon in central France, and revealed to him that the aliens had created all life on Earth.

Boisselier, who has a doctorate in chemistry, has identified herself as a bishop in the Raelian faith. Her secret laboratory in West Virginia was closed last year after its existence became public.

Scientists have cloned a host of mammals, including sheep, mice, cows, pigs, goats and cats, but the procedure has been plagued by a high failure rate and birth defects.

In these efforts, the genetic code is stripped from an unfertilized egg and replaced with DNA from the animal to be cloned. Boisselier said Eve’s mother donated her own DNA, had the modified embryo implanted in her womb, gestated the fetus to term and gave birth.

Four more children cloned under the company’s auspices should also be born in the coming weeks, Boisselier said, and 20 more cloning attempts are planned next month.

Not all scientists and physicians are against the notion of cloning for reproductive purposes if it could be done safely.

“I think cloning human beings, as a potential way to solve certain extreme forms of infertility, would be a desirable breakthrough,” said Dr. Richard Grazi, director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility for Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

But Grazi said he condemned the Clonaid attempt because the science suggests that cloning is not yet safe: “It is clearly wrong to experiment on people.”

In Rome, fertility doctor Severino Antinori, who already had announced that a cloned boy would be born next month, dismissed Clonaid’s announcement. Its claim, he said, “makes me laugh.”

Human cloning has been opposed by most mainstream religious groups, including the Roman Catholic Church, which holds that the practice offends moral law because it denies “the dignity of human procreation and of the conjugal union.” Other religious opponents warn that human cloning represents an attempt by humans to put themselves on a par with God.

“The very attempt to clone a human being is evil,” said Stanley M. Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke University. “The assumption that we must do what we can do is fueled by the Promethean desire to be our own creators.”

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Crawford, Texas, and Larry B. Stammer and Rosie Mestel in Los Angeles contributed to this report.