Home >  Lifestyle >  Columnists

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Last week's announcement by Brigitte Boisselier that her company, Clonaid, has produced the first cloned baby raises two troubling possibilities:

1. She might be lying.

2. She might be telling the truth.

Boisselier, a chemist, is also a bishop in the Raelian church and believes, as such, that humankind was genetically engineered by visiting space aliens and that their designated prophet on Earth is a former French race driver, once named Claude Vorilhon, now known as "Rael."

Where most religions set boundaries on earthly conduct, Raelians are free to roam the ethical plateaus to their bluffs, then, if they wish, hang-glide beyond them into the nearest valley of convenience.

"We don't believe in God," Boisselier told me in a phone conversation one year ago. "We believe in science."

Souls? Forget it.

An afterlife?

"Only if there is an intelligent way of doing something for an afterlife. What I mean is, cloning could give us some kind of eternal life," Boisselier said.

That's what has me praying for a hoax.

Clonaid's advocates were quick to describe the presumptive birth of a healthy baby girl Dec. 26 as an important step toward granting parenthood to infertile couples. Their touchstone at the time was the test tube baby Louise Brown, whose birth 20 years ago ushered in the era of in-vitro fertilization.

But the Dec. 26 birth, real or not, presents us with a dilemma because cloning is also an ongoing goal by scientists who do not believe in space aliens. At some point, science is going to pass ethical understanding along some shaded lane. What emerges could be the world that a Raelian spokeswoman who gave her name as Hortense Dodo described in a phone interview yesterday.

"Through scientific experimentation we should be able to create a full-fleshed human being. The next step would be the complete download of human memory."

In short, grow a second body, transfer your consciousness to it, discard the leftovers, repeat as necessary unto eternity.

Is that a good thing, I asked her.

"What could be wrong about that?" Dodo replied. "I am always surprised when people ask these questions."

And I am always surprised at the surprise of others. As unreal as this sounds in 2003, the ability of humans to nibble at the margins of existence means the impossible is ever-destined to be the commonplace. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rael issued a press release saying that cloning would someday make it possible to resurrect the terrorists from leftover cells.

"This way, no suicidal attack would see its perpetrator escape from justice through death," he explained.

I doubt a world in which the irate desecrate the graves of their enemies could resist such an opportunity. We could bring back Hitler and hang him. We could bring back Ted Williams and have him beat Lee Harvey Oswald to death. We could, in short, walk five paces into the future and freeze ourselves in place, re-enacting the same relationships, emotions and experiences in a way that would profane life itself and do it at the expense of human embryos tossed away after we have plucked the ideal fruit from the petri dish.

"It is impossible to stop science," Boisselier told me. "The only thing that banning will do is that it will push people to do it hidden somewhere." She told me this shortly after Clonaid moved its operations offshore to avoid further visits by the Food and Drug Administration. They had already closed a lab in Nitro, W.Va., and scampered across the border to continue their work. The only phone calls that followed, she said, were from other cloning scientists.

"Some of them are calling me and saying, 'If you do it, make sure you do it right, because if you don't, we'll lose 20 years.' "

That used to be a long time.