A cloned child?

The first human clone, a healthy 7-pound girl named Eve, was born the 26th of December 2002, according to Clonaid, a private company linked to the Raelian religious sect.

While it offered no scientific evidence the birth actually took place, the claim that it engineered such a feat opened a floodgate of debate on Friday over reproductive technologies such as cloning by nuclear transfer and currently accepted IVF. The cloning event occurred because the husband of the couple concerned was infertile.

Identical twins are genetically identical clones that occur naturally, except that they are the same age, while a nuclear transfer clone is obviously conceived as a baby.

The company was in a race with two other groups, headed by Dr. Antinori and Dr. Zavos, to see who could produce a cloned child first. Clonaid hopes to have 20 more births in 2003. They said the first of those is due to be born next week in Europe to a North American couple, followed by three other babies to two Asian couples and a lesbian couple. During a hastily arranged news conference on Friday 27th December 2002 in Hollywood U.S., Brigitte Boisselier, CEO of Clonaid, a company founded in 1997 in the Bahamas, said Eve was born at 11:55 a.m. on Thursday 26th December by Caesarean section.

Boisselier said proof that Eve is a genetic replica of her 31-year-old American mother would come after an independent expert visits the mother and child next week to collect DNA samples, which will be taken to an independent lab for testing. The results should be available within nine days, she said. Boisselier said "the parents are happy", that the child is healthy and urged the media not to treat the baby as "a monster" or "something that is disgusting."

Scientists expressed strong doubts while religious leaders voiced outrage, calling it, among other things, morally wrong. Freelance reporter and physicist Dr. Michael Guillen, a former ABC News science editor, will coordinate the genetic tests using a medical expert of his choosing and an independent lab. He is not being paid by Clonaid and has said he would make the findings public when the analysis is finished. "Scientists make all kinds of claims and often there's no substantiation. I just want to have independent scientists evaluate it," said Guillen, who has been writing about cloning since 1997 and who is paying his own expenses to verify the results.

In human cloning, the nucleus of a human egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of a human cell. The egg then grows into an embryo, using the donor's genes, and is planted in a womb.

To create Eve, the nucleus of a skin cell from the mother was implanted in her egg, Boisselier said, providing the DNA match. She noted this procedure did not take place in the United States, although she did not say where it occurred.

She said the fact the press conference was held in Hollywood beach in the U.S. had nothing to do with the location of the birth.

Boisselier said Eve and her mother, whose name she did not disclose, were in a hospital and would go home Monday. She said Eve's parents are U.S. citizens who have an older daughter from the wife's previous marriage. The husband is infertile.

No U.S. laws directly prohibit human cloning. The Republican House in June approved a bill banning human cloning, but the Senate did not follow suit, fearing a total ban would hurt the potential for advancing medical research. Clonaid began experimenting with human eggs in January of this year and "had really good success really quickly," Boisselier said. Of 10 total implantations in this first round, five women miscarried, she added.

Two other groups also are trying to clone a human, one headed by Dr. Zavos and the other headed up by Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor who in 1994, Antinori helped a 62-year-old woman become pregnant by implanting a donor's fertilized egg in her uterus.

After Dolly, the sheep, was successfully cloned in 1996, Rael, founder of the Raelians, created Clonaid as a private, for-profit firm dedicated to cloning research.

After the Bahamanian government made cloning illegal, the group moved to an undisclosed U.S. location. The company also has a subsidiary in South Korea, although the government there is moving to make cloning research illegal.

The company's main funding was $500,000 from Mark Hunt, a West Virginia lawyer and former legislator. In 2001, he and his wife asked Clonaid to clone their 10-month-old son, who had died two years earlier. He has since severed ties with the company.

That year, FDA officials visited Clonaid's West Virginia lab and ordered all cloning experiments to stop, spokeswoman Lenore Gelb said. Boisselier identifies herself as a Raelian "bishop" and said the group's leader, Rael, put her in charge of the cloning operation several years ago. She also is the mother of a 22-year-old daughter, who Boisselier hopes will become a surrogate mother.

Boisselier claims to possess two chemistry degrees but said she is not a specialist in reproductive medicine. She said Clonaid retains philosophical but not economic links to the Raelians.

If clonaid's claim to have produced a healthy cloned child is substantiated by genetic tests, then it will offer the somewhat controversial option to other infertile couples, who IVF can not help, to conceive a biologically related child.