Whatever Happened to Eve?

In late November 2001, Joe-public, including atheists and agnostics, had held hands and chanted in unison: ’Scientists are playing God!’

’People are trying to discover immortality,’ I read on an Internet forum, ’…trying to become God.’

’I don’t trust the scientists,’ wrote another, ’cos their sickos and doing it for the accolades and money.’

’The same words were said of the first test tube baby Louise.’

’Hey,’ an anonymous person -of the feminist persuasion perhaps- had typed gleefully. ’We can completely eliminate the need for men! Really, it will be a perfect world then. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t want that. Let’s start with Texas...’

…Human cloning had become a reality!

All human (diploid) cells contain 46 chromosomes of DNA (our ’blueprint’). The exceptions are sperm and egg cells (23 chromosomes each) which fuse during fertilisation to form a single cell that contains 46 chromosomes. This cell multiplies and eventually grows into a new human with half of its characteristics derived from each parent.

A clone has all his 46 chromosomes derived from one parent only. Roughly speaking, in order to achieve a clone cell in the lab, one must obtain 46 chromosomes from a diploid cell of the parent clone and introduce it into an egg that has been stripped of its own set of 23 chromosomes. A little electrical shock and the clone cell starts dividing. The process of life begins.

The claim made by the US company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Michigan, Massachusetts, had been spectacular in the moral sense only. Indeed, a ’human’ had been cloned. It was not, however, a rippling, tanned and wired up Dolph Lundgren stepping out of his refrigerator saying, ’you rang m’Lord,’ to the mad Dr. Kawalsky and goggle-eyed Professor Dubersteine in white coats clutching pens and notepads. In reality, the phlegm from an ill geriatric may have harboured more life than the petri dishes of the cloning experiment.

What ACT achieved was an odd ball of cells, a human embryo, that was destroyed when it was only six cells old to reduce the religious backlash. These six embryonic cells possessed, at this stage of their collective lives, the special ability of rapid and unlimited proliferation. They also possessed, very importantly, the ability to form into any cell of the body, a capability lacking in mature specialised cells of adult humans.

Had this sphere been implanted into the uterus, as in normal pregnancy, it would have grown and developed. With every multiplication of cells, different masses of cells would have specialised further into skin, nerves and muscles, but with the ever-decreasing ability to multiply in numbers and change form from say, a muscle cell to a neurone.

Further progression and this leech like clot would have arced with a spine, sprouted limb buds, revealed phalanges, fleshed out lips, fluttered its heart chambers as an Eve but if possessing the all-important chromosome, thumped it like an Adam. And it would have continued developing and specialising. At birth and onwards, the baby would have possessed hundreds of different types of highly specialised cells but with (certain exceptions) virtually no ability to form into another cell with a different function. Moreover, The cells present in highly specialised tissue today, such as his heart muscle, would be the same ones he had when he was born because these cells had stopped multiplying completely. They only ever enlarged with time.

But what is so special about this information?

40 years into the future, if the individual suffers a heart attack, a portion of his heart muscle will die and be replaced by tissue as useless as Johnny Lever’s humour in Bollywood Industry. The heart never recovers because the muscle does not have the capability to regenerate and no other cells of the body possess the capability to change their function to become heart cells. There is no real treatment or repair for this problem…

…Except, and to explain very crudely, to grow an embryo from your own body and ’patch’ the cells of the embryo, with their high rate of proliferation and specialising capacity, onto the damaged heart.

But some people would use this nascent technology to heal millions.

And others would grow shiny brand new humans.

And this is where the problem starts.

After ACT’s announcement, Countries like UK, home to Dolly the Sheep (the first cloned mammal) were quick to seal the loopholes to their 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act and make ’it an offence to place in a woman a human embryo which has been created by a method other than by fertilisation’. In America, the current Government was seen to be against all forms of cloning. But it was predicted that such practises would be conducted in countries where such laws, technologies and booming economies did not exist.

France, December 1973, the instincts of a French motor journalist, Claude Vorilhon, made him visit a volcano where he was greeted by Yahweh Elohim, an extraterrestrial with features hybrid to those of a Japanese Manga comic character and the Jesus (pbuh) of the second coming: straight shoulder-length black hair, a long face, a generous forehead, big almond eyes, a small nose, smaller lips and a French goatee to cap it all off.

Yahweh took Claude, in his spaceship, to the four corners of the Earth where he was informed of instructors such as Moses, Jesus and Mohammed (pbut) carrying humanity forward according to their times. But it was now and only because humanity was dabbling in space travel and DNA manipulation - quite akin to the Star Trek Vulcans not making any contact with Humans until they had developed warp engines - that the Elohim had felt it safe to make contact with their children. Claude was nominated to become the last of the prophets and to prepare humanity for understanding its true place and status in history: not as a race of apes worshipping blue skinned gods, life-giving prophets and the universal Gardener with 99 comprehensible names and infinite incomprehensible ones…but as a species genetically engineered by its parent race, the Elohim, to exist on planet Earth.

During the 80s, the last decade of the Cold War, conspiracy theorists were claiming that animal cloning was being perfected in American laboratories so if, God forbid, a nuclear war had ensued, at least the supply of beef steaks, pork chops, mutton biryani, bacon rashers and ham slices would still have been aplenty.

It was easy to clone a cell by injecting an ’empty egg’ with DNA obtained from a foetus or an embryo but what couldn’t be achieved was getting DNA from an adult animal, an achievement with far more practical implications. Knowing how easy it is to train a youngster to become a lawyer but how hard it is to turn a 53-year-old economist into a musician could have summed up the whole dilemma.

But sometime in early January 1996, Ian Wilmut and his developmental biologists at Roslin institute of Edinborough, Scotland, were artificially inducing a Fin Dorset ewe to shed numerous eggs from her ovaries. One such ’DNA empty’ egg was injected with complete DNA from the ewe’s adult udder cell. There were 277 such modified eggs. Only 29 survived to being implanted into uteruses.

A year later, February 1997, in Nature magazine, the Roslin Institute proudly explained the science with which on 5th June 1996, the worlds first cloned mammal, a single lamb - Dolly the Sheep - had been born.

It was at the same time of February ’97 that the company, Clonaid, was founded in the sunny Bahamas. Its mission to clone the first human baby was fuelled by the utopian belief that human cloning was the first step towards grasping immortality. As the soul perished with the ageing body, their next step would have been to transfer the memories of the aged clone into the brain and body of a new clone, achieving immortality. Its patron was Raël, formally known as the French Claude Vorilhon, and spiritual leader of the 24-year-old Raëlian cult, now boasting a 50,000 strong membership in 84 countries. Three years later, due to fears of being caught, the company was moved to a secret location and its reigns handed over to the ex French biopharmaceutical company worker and a Raëlian Bishop, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier; a character reminiscent of Mortitia Addams from The Addams Family.

It was from this period leading up to the time when everyone had held hands and chanted in unison, ’scientists are playing God,’ when someone began opening Pandora’s box. Naughty scientists began worrying their governments much like naughty boys fret their mothers by threatening to smash their prized crockery if she doesn’t give them their toys.

One such person was the Italian Fertility expert, Dr. Severino Antinori, (perhaps we should call him Dexter) who shot to fame in ’94 for making a 62-year-old woman give birth to a boy. If you’re wondering why the title of Dexter, it’s because despite his medical genius, he obviously didn’t give much importance to the child turning into an orphan by the time he hit 16.

30th January 2001 (10 months before ACT reported human cell cloning and four and a half years after Dolly the Sheep’s birth), Antinori announced that with 400 human eggs, he would clone a human baby within 18 months in the same manner as Dolly the sheep. The outrage didn’t stop him from stating in August 2001 that he was ready to impregnate 200 women - at least 8 of whom were British - with the harvested eggs.

Pandora’s box was already half opened which is why when ACT reported its success in cloning the first human embryo in November 2001, people in scientific positions looked very nervous. It wasn’t long before Antinori announced that three women were pregnant, one of whom was probably a rich Arab woman, and the research was being carried out in an ’Islamic country’ with the birth date forecast to be January 2003.

Did he succeed?

Just over a year later, December 26th 2002, in the true contemporary fashion of lacing the future with the past, the first human clone baby was born in Miami, Florida and named Eve. It wasn’t Dr. Antinori’s project.

It was Clonaid working under the Raëlians’!

Dr. Brigitte Boisselier announced theatrically in a Hollywood hotel, complete with tinsel, that Eve was well and that the scientific community would be provided the opportunity to verify Eve as being the clone of a 31-year-old American woman. Four other clone births were announced to occur around the world by February 2003. Surely enough, on 5th of January 2003, a clone child was born to a Dutch lesbian couple but in an unknown location.

A single man, Michael Guillen, whose journalistic ventures included TV reports on astrology, auras and precognition, was chosen because according to Raël, the Elohim had seen him to be ’sympathetic’. The scientific community’s suspicions only grew for they were demanding a team of independently chosen scientists to take the tests on Eve, a simple swab from the inside of her cheek.

None of that mattered, of course. 11 days after Eve’s birth, Dr. Boisselier announced that the couple had withdrawn access to an independent verifier. A certain Mr. Bernard Seigal had spoilt the party by filing a lawsuit against the ’parents’ of Eve to determine their worthiness as caretakers of the child. The ’mother’ was, legally speaking, only a sister to Eve and did not wield authority a conventional mother would have over a child. The ’parents’ and the cult were considered a dangerous influence on Eve; it was feared that the baby would have been taken away from them, had the scientific verification process ensued.

Said Dr. Boisselier on 7th January 2003: ’If by having to prove my credibility I have to risk in any way the separation of the mother and the baby, as a mother myself, I will never hesitate…I could never have imagined that there would be such insensitive people in the world as this attorney willing to separate a healthy baby from her happy family…If I have to choose between science and love I will always choose love.’

Insensitive? Love? The statistics given by Dr. Boisselier had shown 100% success in impregnation. Unless the Elohim aliens had given the Raëlians the cloning technology themselves, these statistics were outrageously false. I can only point to the film, Alien 4, where ’the alien bitch returns’ alongside the heroine via cloning. The images of seven clones floating dead in fluid-filled glass chambers are nauseating but very real. If anything, it’s a modest number. Dolly was one of 29 ewes that had survived.

The remaining 28 had died from spontaneous abortions, mental handicaps, incomplete formations of visceral organs such as stomachs, limb deformations, body size differences, limited life spans, immune deficiencies, diabetes, and so on.

Compared to Humans, it is far easier to reproductively clone sheep.

By now, Pandora’s box is wide open. The mainstream scientific community is seething because therapeutic cloning is also being banned in many countries, cloning that could better the lives of millions.

Places like UK and Australia have embraced therapeutic cloning with the aim to becoming leaders in this medical field. The States, on the other hand, is currently reviewing a Bill, which would ban all forms of cloning. Depending on the reason being submitted for the ban on therapeutic cloning, various other issues may unfurl. If it is to curb the chances of reproductive cloning, the disapproval may come only from the scientific community. If it is banned because it is wrong to destroy so many embryos, this may become a catalyst, by the Pro-Life group, to ban abortions in the US.

In the mean time, the public is wondering just what the whole fuss behind saving a few embryos by banning therapeutic cloning is. At what point does a collection of cells become human being? At what stage should they deserve the title of life and be given their set of rights? It doesn’t really matter what we think because the emotional, physical and constitutional rights of embryos and foetuses are being overlooked by 15 - 50 year olds on a daily basis in abortion clinics. If one can burn and melt to death a trillion-celled 6-month-old foetus, a brand new and unique life, by injecting concentrated saline solution into their amniotic fluid, then should not one have the right to grow a 150-200 celled entity derived from themselves and use it to lead a healthier life?

Just recently, the third of the five clones promised by the Raëlians has apparently been born to a Japanese woman. The cells for the clone were derived from a two-year-old boy who had recently died in a car accident. Dr. Severino ’Dexter’ Antinori is hunger striking (no solids only) in front of the office of the Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Berlusconi. He is doing so to protest his fury at what he considers is hindrance to science. Mr. Guillen, the TV scientist, has stepped away from the investigation, saying: ’It’s still entirely possible Clonaid’s announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raëlians movement.’

And we still have to confirm if Eve even exists.