US cult ready for alien visits and messiah clones

The sci-fi circus and its cast of believers in aliens are obscuring some hard truths, argues ROGER FRANKLIN.

UNITED STATES - Talk is always cheap in Washington, but ever since cloning and stem cells became an obsession, it has come at a triple discount.

Someone, somewhere, sooner or later, will no doubt fulfil the prediction that cloning a human baby is not merely possible but practical. In the meantime, one conclusion is inescapable: someone must already have cloned balderdash, because it's awfully thick on the ground.

One night last week, for example, veteran CBS anchorman Dan Rather threw up his hands in baffled defeat. "It's the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with," Rather conceded after a particularly long and convoluted report on the latest developments.

Then the light bulb went on. "So, if you're really interested in this," he ad-libbed, "you'll want to read one of the better newspapers."

At least Rather was honest, which can't be said for most of the other participants in what is being described, laughably, as a "national debate on cloning and stem cells".

That was the way George W. Bush's handlers summed things up when their boss interrupted his Texas holiday to address the nation.

Like Rather, the President might have benefited from more reliable sources of information, because when his homily was dissected the next day it was found to be riddled with spurious assertions and, pardon the pun, misconceptions.

Then there was the so-called "clone summit" convened by the National Academy of Sciences, the gabfest at which people in a position to know better took many a detour around the truth. In measured and responsible tones, speaker after speaker solemnly opined that cloning whole babies was a bad idea.

That is, of course, the party line of the biotech industry, which has no real interest in cloning fully formed children. What it wants, what its congressional allies fought a losing battle to defend when the House of Representatives recently banned human cloning, is the right to clone embryos to extract the stem cells that are being touted as cures for everything from Alzheimer's to diabetes and quadriplegia. As a Wall St observer at the conference let slip, stem cells could take up where dot-coms left off as "the next big thing" for stock market speculators.

Such was the po-faced sincerity at the gathering that the only speakers to display genuine enthusiasm for cloning babies were a trio of biochemists from Italy, France and the US who work for a crackpot cult that sees cloning as a sacrament.

As the cult's scientific brains work to clone their bouncing baby messiah, fellow adherents await the arrival of benevolent beings in UFOs by engaging in sexual adventures orchestrated by their French guru, who makes his headquarters in a Montreal amusement park.

Mainstream researchers scoffed at the claim by French chemist Brigitte Boisselier that "80 women are standing by, including my own daughter" to carry the cult's cloned embryos to term. They would need all those uteruses and more, the sceptics pointed out, because 266 failures - most of them grossly deformed - preceded the arrival of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal.

All the same, Boisselier and her colleagues, Italian Dr Severino Antinori and American Panos Zavos, insisted their "secret laboratories" were poised to succeed.

For the next few days, the scientific establishment huffed as reporters regurgitated old clippings about the UFO cult's leader, Claude Vorhilon. The former racing driver claims to have been abducted in 1973 to the planet Rael, where he supped with Jesus, Allah and Muhammad (Buddha and Confucius must have been running late) and mastered "secrets of sensuality" with half-a-dozen randy robots.

Back on Earth, he preaches the Raelian gospel while relieving disciples of 13 per cent of their annual incomes.

As a sideline, the Raelians branched out into cloning, offering to replicate humans at $US200,000 ($462,600) a pop. Last week, one of those Raelian laboratories came to light in the town of Nitro, West Virginia, a hillbilly state where the rest of America has long taken it for granted that backwoods families are conducting genetic experiments of a more traditional kind - the sort involving brothers, sisters and close cousins.

The "lab" was a major disappointment: a shabby rented classroom in a former high school where Boisselier had been extracting large sums from a former state legislator eager to resurrect an infant son who failed to survive heart surgery.

Though the Raelians claim to have another lab - South Korea is the most likely location - the Nitro site did little to inspire confidence. Apart from an Apple computer, the most sophisticated pieces of equipment were a jar of felt-tip pens and a second-hand incubator that appears to have burst into flames when someone tried to plug it in.

All in all, the discovery provided an element of light relief - which was a pity since it also distracted attention from the deeper questions surrounding mainstream research. The biotech industry must have been delighted to see the Raelians drawing some of the fire that might otherwise have been directed its way.

The proof that the industry is deliberately downplaying some very unpleasant truths came in the July issue of Science, which featured a report by two researchers who had been cloning mouse stem cells. Much to their surprise, the cells that should have responded in an identical fashion refused to cooperate. The genes in some cells inexplicably refused to turn on. In others, they went berserk.

In their original draft, the authors concluded that stem cells are likely to be of limited use "in clinical applications". But by the time the report appeared, that line had been edited out - reportedly under industry pressure.

Nor did Science cite the one known experiment on a human - a Chinese attempt to treat Parkinson's disease by injecting stem cells into the victim's brain. Instead of a cure, the cells spawned a diabolical cancer. When the subject was autopsied, the tumour that killed him was found to be a mass of hair, bone and skin.

Those unpleasant facts don't mesh with images of Christopher Reeve rising unaided from his wheelchair.

For the biotech industry, it's much better to see the press, the public and potential investors laughing at a bunch of UFO fanatics than considering the obvious truth: many more years of animal experiments will be needed before stem cells can serve humanity. Unless those aliens from Rael intervene, it is a day that remains far in the future.


Feature: Cloning humans

Professor Severino Antinori

Human Cloning Foundation

bioethics.net

Religious Tolerance looks at cloning