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American Morning

Controversial Cloners Lose Principle Funding

Aired August 06, 2001 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: A controversial research project to clone humans may have lost its chief source of funds. Back in March, the group Clonaid had told CNN that it was ready to clone a human being and it would do so within weeks. Well, now, the chief backer of Clonaid, former U.S. legislator Mark Hunt, is now withdrawing his financial support for Clonaid, which was supposed to clone his dead son as one of its first projects.

Now, Clonaid was founded by members of a religion called the Raelian movement, which believes that life on earth was created by extraterrestrial scientists and that cloning is a way of achieving eternal life, if you will. Clonaid has also been the subject of an FDA probe after it told a Congressional hearing that it wanted to clone a human in the U.S.

Well, last week, as you may know, the U.S. House voted to ban human cloning even for research.

Let's find out some more about this group, Clonaid, now from its scientific director. Brigitte Boisselier joins us from New York. We thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. As memory serves us, the last time we spoke with you, perhaps back in March or so, you said that you were going to be having -- you were going to have a human clone by the month of April and that did not happen. Or did it happen?

BRIGITTE BOISSELIER, CLONAID SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR: I never said that it would be by the end of April. I'm very surprised when I hear that on the -- or when I read that on articles. I said that we were in the process of doing it and we are, our research are going very nicely and everything is fine with Clonaid.

Now, I will not reveal exactly when the first clone will, is supposed to be born because I don't want to have the FDA into that every day. But everything is going very, very nicely.

HARRIS: Now, is the FDA your concern? Is that the reason why you're moving out of the U.S., as we hear now?

BOISSELIER: It's true that we opened up a new facility in, outside of the U.S. because I want to respect the law in the country I'm living in. And so I did respect for the law and I will not do anything against the law in this country. HARRIS: So that's, so the move that was made in Congress, the enacting of this bill, this anti-cloning bill, that is the specific reason why you moved outside the U.S.?

BOISSELIER: No, actually I'm, it's not a surprise that this bill was passed at the House of Representatives. It has to pass the Senate now and you should remember in 1998 the Senate refused to accept such a law. So I'm very confident that the freedom of reproduction will be preserved in this country.

HARRIS: So is it true, then, that you expect to be part of a movement to actually push this issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court?

BOISSELIER: We definitely want to challenge it because, up to the Supreme Court, because we believe that it is perfectly anti the constitution to dictate what should be the right of people, how to reproduce. One day we'll be able to reproduce either by sexual reproduction, in vitro fertilization, cloning. It will be a broad choice and you are allowed to do what you want with your own genes.

HARRIS: Well, where do you...

BOISSELIER: So I think that's, we will push very far.

HARRIS: Well, what do you say, then, to those who say that you are rushing this whole process? In fact, the sheep Dolly, the famous sheep that was cloned, it too some 300 attempts at cloning for it to be successful that time around and along the way there were a number of deformed calves that were formed that had to be destroyed along the way.

Since the science has not been totally nailed down and every wrinkle ironed out, why is it, then, you want to proceed and have the same chances of that happening with a human?

BOISSELIER: Well, you know, four years ago they needed several hundreds of embryos to have one clone. Today, they are, the success rate is around 15 to 20 percent already. And sexual reproduction, normal reproduction, we should say, are at a success rate of 10 percent in the human. So, you know, if we compare just the numbers.

But what is important to know is that we have 22 years experience in in vitro fertilization, in producing human embryos. They don't have the same experience doing sheep embryos or cows' embryos. So they implement everything and see what's going out. We don't do that for human beings. We proceed embryos and check very, very carefully what, if the embryo is viable, whether there are any defects and there things to do that. And we also have designed very proprietary techniques to check genes imprinting. I mean I don't want to go too much into the details...

HARRIS: Right. I understand.

BOISSELIER: But they are very good ways to check whether an embryo is viable or not. HARRIS: Well, let me ask you about some, whether or not, another comment that has been associated, that has been attributed to you is that you had some 50 women who were standing by, willing volunteers, to be implanted. Now, we have not heard about anyone coming up or producing a child or producing it in an embryo, even, from this process.

Have you been working with these 50 women all along and we just haven't heard the reports about it?

BOISSELIER: Well, I will not disclose where I am right now. I'm sorry. So the only thing I'm telling you is that we have labs. We have partners and we are proceeding in a very serious and conscious way and, indeed, we also have surrogate mothers to carry the child. So everything is perfect in our project.

HARRIS: We will continue to keep our eye on your project. We want to learn everything that happens along the way.

Brigitte Boisselier, we thank you very much for your time this morning.

BOISSELIER: Thank you.

HARRIS: We'll talk to you soon.

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