-Caveat Lector- Group says it will move human cloning work offshore June 29, 2001 By Miriam Falco CNN Medical Producer (CNN) -- A group trying to clone a human being said Friday it will move part of its cloning operations outside the United States after it was told by the federal government to stop its work. The chief scientist for the group -- called the Raelians -- said Food and Drug Administration representatives visited her lab in the spring and told her stop cloning experiments. The FDA would not comment. Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, chief scientist for Clonaid -- the research company founded by the Raelians -- said the company's lab is in the United States, but she would not reveal where. The Raelians are a religious group that say extraterrestrials used genetic engineering to create life on earth. Boisselier said the FDA told her "I should stop, and that they have jurisdiction" over her lab. Boisselier said she was confident she would win if she were to challenge the FDA's order, but said she was not interested in battling the agency. Her interests lie in proving that it is safe to clone a human, she said. Boisselier said in March that Clonaid could have a cloned embryo ready to be carried by a surrogate mother by April. In June, she told CNN she would not confirm a pregnancy until a healthy baby is born. Boisselier, a chemistry professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, said her goal is to create a "healthy, belated twin" of a 10-month-old boy who died. Fifty members of this movement, including her 24-year-old daughter, have volunteered to carry the clone, she said. U.S. News and World Report will report in next week's issue that a federal grand jury in Syracuse, New York, has subpoenaed Boisselier's phone records and other documents. Boisselier told CNN she has not been served with any subpoenas. Another researcher, former University of Kentucky professor Panayiotis Zavos, said he plans to clone a human within the year. A federal moratorium bans the use of federal funds for research on cloning humans, and many scientists abroad are abiding by a self-imposed moratorium on cloning humans. Several countries forbid cloning by law. But among U.S. states, only California, Michigan, Louisiana and Rhode Island expressly ban any type of cloning research. But if there are few legal hurdles, the scientific and ethical problems involved are daunting: Scientists who have cloned other mammals are urging more work be done before attempts at cloning humans are undertaken. "It is not responsible at this state to even consider the cloning of humans," said Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, who has cloned mice. Dolly's difficult legacy In 1997, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult. At the time, the possibility of cloning a human seemed to have moved from science fiction into the realm of possibility. Since then, scientists have cloned cows, goats, pigs and mice -- but their success rate is as low as one live birth in 100 attempts. In order to clone a human, scientists would remove the nucleus of an egg and extract its genetic material, leaving just its shell. Then the nucleus of a cell taken from the body of the person to be cloned would be inserted into the egg. With the only genetic material from the person to be cloned inside the egg, the cell would then jolted with electricity to activate cell division. The embryo would then be implanted into a surrogate, who -- if the experiment were to succeed -- would carry the fetus to term. Putting theory into practice is not easy: Cloning the sheep Dolly required 277 attempts. And cloning cattle has proven equally difficult. "At least half, probably about three-quarters of pregnancies that are generated will be lost," predicted Dr. Jonathan Hill, assistant professor of animal reproduction at Cornell University. Mark Westhusin, associate professor of veterinary science at Texas A&M, said between 85 percent and 95 percent of cloned embryos die during the first trimester, he said. And when large mammals like cattle are cloned, Hill said, the animals are often sick. "Their livers, their lungs, their heart, the blood vessels, their placental vessels, and the placenta are often abnormal at birth," he said. And cloned animals are often huge. Hill said water retention is a result of poor placental development, resulting in larger-than-normal calves. Boisselier said that any pregnancy would be monitored and, should it go awry, "we will anticipate to do an abortion." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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