Eve Redux: The Public Confusion over Cloning. (Essay)

As any well-informed newspaper reader knows by now, the white-robed prophet Rael (nee Claude Vorilhon) is a soft-spoken, French-born, Canadian-based apostle of cloning technology who claims to have been conceived by a human mother and a space alien. The former race car driver also claims to have had two encounters with aliens in the 1970s and to have boarded their spaceship. He believes that humans were created by cloning techniques developed by alien civilizations, and he has established a sect called the Raelians to promote human reproductive cloning, to the point of forming a private company called Clonaid. Rael considers himself a half-brother to Jesus Christ and requests that visitors address him as Your Holiness. In the calculus of most working journalists, the combination of UFO-ology, prophetic megalomania, and alien conception would ordinarily land Rael and his followers on the gentle, lowland slopes of any credibility curve. And yet a steady stream of writers--sometimes from prominent publications--have made the pilgrimage to U.F.O.-land in Valcourt, Quebec, to interview Rael (apparently some even agreed to submit questions in advance and call him Your Holiness). For its loony entertainment value, Rael and his be-robed colleagues make for an irresistible human interest story, but that also helps explain why Raelian claims to have created a cloned human child named Eve received such widespread and frenzied attention in the press in December 2002. Although the sect did not provide a shred of scientific evidence to back up its claim, the news prompted a familiar, even reflexive cultural reaction: social conservatives fulminated, the president reiterated his absolute opposition to all forms of cloning, and respectable scientists were left shaking their heads. In a larger sense, that reaction helps explain why the national debate on cloning and stem cell research has so often spun off the road and into a ditch of techno-social voyeurism, ideological rhetoric, and political histrionics. While reporting for my book Merchants of Immortality, I've been a front-row observer to many events in this debate, and I've been struck by several recurrent themes: overreaction by both the press and politicians to sensational (and often unsubstantiated) claims, the absence of critical judgment in assessing these claims, the role of private entities (whether biotech companies or sects) in setting the tempo and terms of the public debate with their announcements, and a devaluation of science in the overall discourse. The public, and policymakers, have been poorly served by the quality of this important bioethical discussion. A key moment in this debate occurred in August 2001, at a workshop on cloning sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, because it revealed an illuminating gap between the rigorous, devil-in-the-details ethos of science and the rather more superficial world of public perception. Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute, described detailed molecular studies that identified a series of glitches embedded in the DNA of cloned mice. These so-called flaws--aberrations in the regulation or expression of genes but not in the genetic sequence of the genes themselves--could trigger arrested development or serious post-natal dysfunction. After Jaenisch laid out the data, a member of the National Academy panel directed a question at Brigitte Boisselier, the head scientist of Clonaid, who had previously described the Raelians' intent to clone human babies. What, she was asked, was Clonaid doing to identify the sort of epigenetic flaws that Jaenisch's group had described in the scientific literature? Boisselier dipped her head politely, smiled reassuringly, and announced in an eerily lilting voice that Clonaid scientists had already developed molecular assays to test for ten such epigenetic flaws in human embryos. The claim was absurd. I was sitting in the audience that day, and almost fell out of my chair. …

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