December 29, 2002	Sunday	Shawwal 24, 1423

WASHINGTON: A cult which believes that humans were first created by aliens claimed on Friday that it had won the clandestine and increasingly bizarre race to produce a human clone. It said a baby girl was born on Thursday from an egg fertilized by a skin cell from her mother.

Brigitte Boisselier, who calls herself a bishop of the Raelian sect, offered no proof to back her claim at a press conference in Florida, but said an independent panel of scientists would be allowed to verify it with DNA tests in the next eight or nine days.

The announcement provoked an outcry among scientists concerned it might open the floodgates to many other human clones when both the safety and ethics of the process are still very much in question.

Ms Boisselier, a former research chemist from France, said a company associated with the cult, Clonaid, expected four more cloned babies to be born in the next two months, the first next week to a lesbian couple at a secret location in Europe.

Two other couples, one Asian and one North American, were expecting babies made with cells taken from previous children who had died. She added that 20 more women would be implanted with cloned embryos at a new Clonaid laboratory in January.

A maverick Italian gynaecologist, Severino Antinori, has also announced that another baby cloned with his help would be born in January. Dr Antinori said the mother, in the 33rd week of pregnancy, and the 5lb 11oz (2.7kg) male foetus were doing well, but he declined to give details.

At a press conference made all the more surreal by her dramatic orange and white hair, Ms Boisselier, the head of Clonaid, beamed and declared: “I’m very, very pleased to announce that the first baby clone is born.” She called the baby “Eve”, and said she was born by Caesarean section on Dec 26, weighing 7lb and was “doing fine”.

But Ms Boisselier would not reveal where she was born, saying only that the parents were American and would return to the US in three days. She said the couple had sought help from Clonaid because the husband was sterile.

British scientists were among those condemning the news. Dr Patrick Dixon, a leading expert on the ethics of human cloning, said: “There’s a global race by maverick scientists to produce clones, motivated by fame, money and warped and twisted beliefs. The baby born has been born into a living nightmare with a high risk of malformations, ill-health, early death and unimaginably severe emotional pressures.”

A spokeswoman for the human fertilization and embryology authority said it was “concerned”, but would reserve judgment until it was convinced that the claims were accurate.

President Jacques Chirac of France called for a worldwide ban on attempts to clone human beings, which is “contrary to the dignity of man”. He urged all countries to sign a convention presented to the United Nations by France and Germany that is aimed at the “universal prohibition of human reproductive cloning”.

Human cloning is permitted in the US under limited conditions and only for the cultivation of cells for therapeutic purposes such as transplants. Using cloned human cells to induce a pregnancy is banned.

Randall Prather, a reproductive biotechnology expert at the University of Missouri said he had no way of telling whether Clonaid’s claims were true, but, if confirmed, they had “devalued human dignity.”

Scientists across the US were skeptical about Clonaid’s claims, particularly of Ms Boisselier’s claim that of 10 women implanted with cloned embryos, five had sustained successful pregnancies, a success rate far in excess of experiments in cloning animals.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.