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- (Note - When they succeed, this time or soon after, civilization
and human existence will instantly change, forever. 'Immortality' will
be at hand. It is not possible to overstate the importance and potential
impact of this achievement. -ed)
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- A company run by a bizarre cult is to start work this
week on creating the world's first cloned human baby. It is intended to
be a genetic copy of a 10-month-old girl who died in February.
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- The project is being carried out in a secret laboratory
which is believed to be in the American desert state of Nevada. The scientists
involved hope their baby will be born towards the end of next year.
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- The company is called Clonaid and is run by a cult that
believes humans originated from aliens. It has been created to purchase
surplus human egg "envelope" cells from infertility laboratories.
A waiting list of people who want to be cloned has been started.
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- The first attempt will be made using the cells of a baby
who died in America earlier this year. Her parents have put £300,000
into the project to recreate their daughter. Five British couples, including
two pairs of homosexual men, have asked to go on the waiting list.
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- Among those who have ex-pressed an interest in cloning
are Peter and Ildiko Blackburn, both computer consultants from Huntingdon,
Cambridgeshire, who have undergone years of unsuccessful infertility treatment.
This weekend, they de-clined to discuss whether they were involved with
Clonaid.
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- The company, registered in the Bahamas, where organisations
do not have to reveal their accounts, was founded by the Raelian movement,
a religious cult which claims to have more than 50,000 members in 85 countries.
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- Boisselier: after 'eternal life'The cloning initiative
is being led by Brigitte Boisselier, 44, a French-born biochemist who spent
part of her studies at the respected Insead business school outside Paris,
where the Tory leader William Hague was a student.
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- Boisselier, a divorced mother-of-three who is the Raelians'
scientific director and is based in New York state, said: "We are
about to start the process in animals to check that our systems work, and
by January we will move to human cells. The first pregnancies will hopefully
begin in February. For us the purpose of this project is philosophical,
to create eternal life."
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- The Raelians plan to use the same basic technique that
created Dolly, the world's first cloned animal, in Scotland four years
ago. This involves removing the nucleus from a human egg cell, then inserting
the nucleus from a mature cell.
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- Theoretically, passing an electric current through the
newly reconstituted cell causes it to revert to an embryonic state and
begin developing as a baby, genetically identical to the donor of the nucleus.
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- Dolly was the sole survivor of 347 embryos. Boisselier
acknowledges that there will be a high miscarriage rate, but says improved
cell manipulation methods which have been developed by her four-strong
scientific team will be much less wasteful of human eggs.
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- More than 50 volunteer surrogate mothers, including Boisselier's
oldest child, Marina Cocolios, have been recruited to carry the first cloned
pregnancies. Cocolios, 22, who moved with her mother from Versailles in
France, is now in the final year of a fine arts degree in Montreal, Canada.
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- "I volunteered for this a year ago, my mother never
pushed me," she said.
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- Raelians believe humans are all cloned from a group of
alien scientists from another planet. This information is said to have
been passed on, in a 1973 visitation, to Claude Vorilhon. A former sports
journalist, he moved from France to Quebec, changed his name to Rael and
founded the cult. Apart from cloning, the main preoccupation of Raelians
is the creation of an embassy to welcome aliens arriving on Earth.
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- Unlike Britain, America has no legal ban on cloning,
but research has been hampered by a ban on the use of public funds. The
country's Food and Drug Administration is monitoring the Raelian initiative.
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- There is no doubt that the Raelians are deadly serious
and their project has already caused outrage in Las Vegas. A spokesman
for Harry Reid, a Democratic senator for Nevada, said he had received letters
of protest - but did not know where the laboratory was.
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- Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly, condemned
the project as "absolutely criminal". Tony Perry, a leading British-born
cloning expert at Rockefeller University in New York, said it was "morally
repugnant" to try to clone humans when animal experiments were producing
clones with high levels of defects.
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- While some experts doubt the Raelians have the expertise
to achieve success, others say it is simply a question of mathematical
probability: 20 egg donors and 50 surrogate mothers would probably be enough
to make a human clone.
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- Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, director of reproductive
medicine and infertility at St Bartholemew's and the Royal London hospitals,
said: "If the research were not so heavily regulated, production of
a human clone could be no more than one to three years away.
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- "For some people, producing a child identical to
one who has died could be quite reasonable, but in addition to that, cloning
technology will provide human spare parts and teach us about the genetic
and environmental influences on disease. It will have very major benefits."
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- Additional reporting: John Elliott
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