Clonaid Promises Proof of Cloned Baby

Dec. 30, 2002 -- It was a dramatic scientific claim, and now it's time for proof.

A 7-pound baby purported to be the first human clone is due to arrive in the United States today and will face DNA testing as a group that sponsored the birth tries to prove to a skeptical scientific community that the child is indeed a clone.

Brigitte Boisselier, the chief executive of Clonaid, a cloning company affiliated with a religious sect that believes aliens gave rise to life on Earth, told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America that scientists will be offered all the proof they require within a week.

"The only way for me to prove this is to have an independent expert going to the place of the parents, sampling the cells of the baby and mother and comparing them with [genetic] tests that are well known," said Boisselier, who claims to have two chemistry degrees. "Then you'll have all the proof you need."

Proof, Please

Boisselier made the announcement on Friday that her group had produced the world's first cloned baby. She said the baby was delivered to a 31-year-old American woman by Caesarean section on Thursday and that a pediatrician had examined the child — nicknamed "Eve" — and found that she was in fine health.

The scientific community has responded with skepticism and dismay, citing the several failed cloning attempts of other mammals. They have also pointed out that Boisselier has offered no proof — no photographs or genetic tests — to prove her claim.

"How do you know?" Glenn McGee, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said on Good Morning America. "Independent experts testing a baby named Eve or whatever the baby turns out to be named when she arrives in the United States, will be great if it happens, but the first test that science applies to its own work is peer review. Who is going to do the testing? And how will that be published and peer reviewed?"

At the news conference on Friday, Boisselier said that former ABCNEWS science editor Michael Guillen would select independent experts, who would then determine if the newborn girl was, in fact, an exact genetic copy.

Parent May Face Legal Issues

Boisselier defended her group's reticence in not offering immediate proof the child is a clone, citing patenting concerns.

"You have to remember this is a private company," she said. "To give you all the details of all the science we have been doing would jeopardize our position as, I would say a leader in this arena. This is not university research, it was private research."

If scientists do corroborate Clonaid's claims and show that the child is a clone, McGee argues that there will be other hurdles to face — moral and legal ones. He says that in every state except California, a cloned baby would not be considered to be the child of its mother and would need to be legally adopted.

"This new family, as it were, will have to turn to the state courts to find out whether or not they can raise their own baby," McGee said.

The process Clonaid claims to have used involves taking cells from the skin of the person to be cloned. Genetic material is then extracted from the cells and injected into a human egg whose nucleus has been destroyed. After a tiny electric shock, the cells begin to multiply and eventually form a human embryo.

The embryo is then implanted in the uterus where it develops into a baby.

McGee and others have pointed out that all efforts to clone animals, including primates, mice and farm animals have failed or have at least been preceded by failures. He and others worry that Clonaid's purported successful cloning may have followed failed attempts that resulted in fatally ill or misshapen babies.

Boisselier argued this did not happen and that past cloning failures in other animals were due to a lack of knowledge about assisted reproduction.

Boisselier: ‘No Right to Judge’

"The defects seen in cloned animals like cows are the exactly the same defects you observe when you do IVF [in vitro fertilization] in cows," she said. "What it means is that they don't know how to produce embryos, how to implant them — it's not related to cloning. And we don't have this kind of defects when we do IVF of humans."

As for the moral ramifications of producing a human clone, Boisselier argued that it is not scientists' role to criticize a parent's decision to have a baby by any method.

"You can have all good reasons to have a child and bad reasons as well," she said. "But who are we to judge why parents want to have a baby?"

Boisselier has said a second cloned baby is due next week to a lesbian couple in northern Europe and three other couples are expected to give birth to clones by early February.