|
 hen
Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts biotech firm, announced
this weekend that they had cloned human embryos, a group called
Clonaid jumped into their shadow by insisting that they, too, have
been cloning human embryos.
"I'm very
pleased that I'm not alone," Clonaid director Brigitte Boisselier
said. "We're doing embryos every day."
Clonaid dubs
itself "the first human cloning company." Whether or not
it is remains to be seen. Clonaid keeps its labs secret — they
claim for security reasons.
What it definitely
is, is run by a cult that considers human cloning, and ultimately
immortality, a goal. Named after RAËL, the cult's founder,
the group claims "that life on earth was created scientifically
in laboratories by extraterrestrials whose name (ELOHIM) is found
in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the word 'God.'"
They also claim that Jesus' resurrection was, in fact, a cloning
performed by ELOHIM. The Washington
Bulletin provided a good primer on the cult this summer.
And for the
Raelians — whose Clonaid project is funded by a man whose ten-month-old
son died after a heart operation, and who wants the son's DNA to
be used for the creation of a clone — the time is now. They
have their own answer to terrorism. After September 11, RAËL
declared:
We must accelerate
the development of human cloning technology because it will make
terrorist attacks inefficient in the future. Indeed, when phase
3 of cloning will be reached (the one which will allow the direct
cloning of an adult thanks to the Accelerated Growth Process)
it will be followed by the uploading or downloading of information
into one's brain that contains personality, memory, and life experiences.
Therefore,
when a tragedy occurs, such as the recent one, cloning will bring
back to life all of the victims — directly as adults and
their personality will be downloaded into their brain. For this
to happen however, it will be necessary to have a genetic bank
in each country which would contain the genetic code (what primitive
people used to call the "soul") of each individual from
their birth, and for each individual to regularly download on
their PC a back-up of their personality (memory and experience)
which could then be transferred into the new clone. The person
who would benefit from this technology would only, after a tragedy,
have the last day missing from their memory. This technology would
also allow the cloning of terrorists, thus allowing us to try
them for their crimes. This way, no suicidal attack would see
its perpetrator escape from justice through death.
Clonaid's are
not the only cloning entrepreneurs with some PR issues. At a meeting
convened by the National Academy of Sciences last August, an international
panel of scientists met to discuss human cloning. The conference
was an opportunity for supposed pioneers in the field to show their
true colors.
"It's
like the Taliban in Afghanistan," "Dr. Miracle" Severino
Antinori said of the House of Representatives, which voted just
before its August recess to ban human cloning — a vote Antinori
says took the U.S. back "into the Dark Ages."
Antinori, who
along with his partner, Dr. Panos Zavos, has run laboratories in
Kentucky, recruited over 1,300 American and 200 Italian couples
to be part of their human-clone experiments. Since cloning is outlawed
in most European countries, including Italy, by the terms of a 1988
treaty, and since conducting it in the U.S. would require FDA approval,
Antinori and Zavos have not disclosed where their experiments will
take place, although Israel, Cyprus, and assorted former Soviet
republics have been mentioned as possibilities. Britian's ambiguous
phony ban has led Antinori to publicly set his sights there, too.
"Ours
will be an experiment of therapeutic cloning for those couples who
have no hope of having children," Antinori told an Italian
newspaper. Reuters quoted him as saying that cloning will "help
us put an end to so many diseases, give infertile men the chance
to have children. We can't miss this opportunity." In the mid
1990s, Antinori garnered international attention for using in vitro
fertilization to allow a 62-year-old woman to become pregnant.
Making sure
not to be left out, Zavos said that his labs are not only cloning
human embryos, but are on the verge of implanting embryos into infertile
women. "We will be attempting pretty soon the first nuclear
transfers." He claims the deed will be done before the end
of the year, or at the beginning of 2002.
Whether the
Raelians and other mad scientists are cloning or not, more pernicious
may be the mainstream biotech firms — like Advanced Cell Technology
— which are slowly making inroads in cloning technology, and
which may yet win the PR war, despite their odd compatriots. Once
they've won Americans' hearts and minds, without a permanent ban
on human cloning, you can preview the rest of the dehumanizing future
with Aldous Huxley.
|
