AMSTERDAM, Jan 4: The world’s second cloned baby was born on Friday to a Dutch woman, the head of the Raelian movement in the Netherlands said on Saturday.
“A baby girl was born yesterday evening. The baby is healthy and the mother, too,” Bart Overvliet told Reuters in a telephone conversation.
The woman, a lesbian, is now in the Netherlands with her partner but the birth might have taken place in another country, he added.
The Raelians said last month they had overseen the birth of the world’s first cloned baby, also a girl.
NOT ANSWER COURT: Meanwhile, a report from Washington said that the guru of the Raelian sect said on Friday he would ignore a Florida court’s summons that he appear at a hearing to decide whether to place the (first claimed) cloned infant under the court’s protection.
Claude Vorilhon, who heads the Raelian sect and calls himself Rael, told Canadian public broadcasting TV that he would “absolutely not” answer a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, court order to appear on January 22 with other principals to the cloned birth, which has never been authenticated by scientific proof.
Vorilhon said late on Thursday that DNA testing begun Tuesday to authenticate the cloning, the results of which were to have been released next week, was stopped after the Florida court issued its summons.
The developments came a week after the Raelians, and the Clonaid group it funds, announced the first human clone.
Vorilhon said he had ordered the DNA testing stopped because of the Florida bid to put the cloned infant, named “Eve,” under court protection.
Florida lawyer Bernard Siegel said he had asked for a court to determine if baby Eve should be placed under court protection. He said a juvenile division court in Broward County had set a hearing for January 22.
“The legal custodian — the parents — are required to be there, as well as the respondents, Clonaid and Rael,” he said.
According to Boisselier, a baby girl cloned from her 31-year-old US mother was born on December 26 by Caesarian section at a hospital outside the United States. Boisselier is a senior member of the Raelians.
Siegel told AFP he had petitioned the court, in a personal capacity, to place “Eve” under the court’s protection.
“I was concerned that, if this (the cloning) is true, this child is an abused child, that it could have some serious genetic, fatal problems and that the child was being exploited by Clonaid,” he said.
Siegel’s petition to name the court as guardian, was lodged Tuesday in Circuit Court, juvenile division, in Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami.
“The purpose of my lawsuit is to appoint a guardian for this child. Because I perceived that this child, more than any other child in the world, needs legal protection under the United States courts,” said Siegel.
Meanwhile, Clonaid spokeswoman Nadine Gary told AFP that the parents were afraid the baby would be taken away from them.
MONSTER: Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s Molecular Genetics Institute said that “efforts to clone humans will produce a “monster 99 per cent of the time.”
Responding to last week’s announcement of the first birth of a human clone, Vyacheslav Tarantul warned that nearly all cloning efforts have led to horrific biological deformations.
“It is theoretically possible to clone a human being, but who will take responsibility if a monster is born? This risk exists in 99 per cent of the cases,” ITAR-TASS reported him as saying.
“During cloning experiments on animals, we have found anomalies in most cases — cancer, in particular,” Tarantul added.
Tarantul denounced the lack of any concrete evidence provided to back the Raelian’s history-making claims.
“It only takes three or four days to make a comparitive DNA analysis of the mother and child in order to see whether this is the case of the first clone, or a publicity stunt,” he said.—AFP
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