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Israel: Keep Out the Clones
Netty C. Gross
It's late-March afternoon Ben-Gurion Airport and two bizarre-looking people are hurrying to the Air Canada counter. Dr. Brigitte Boisellier, a smiling, petite, heavily lipsticked Frenchwoman, sports long hair distinctively streaked bright red and yellow, and Leon Mellul, a 54-year-old ponytailed man clad in white, has a gray, flowing, maharishi-style beard. Mellul�s conventionally dressed wife, Jose, is in tow. They chat loudly in French and wear dangling medallions bearing embellished versions of the Star of David, symbols of the Raelian Church.
Boisellier, who holds doctorates in physical and analytical chemistry, has drawn notoriety since her sensational announcement last December that a company she runs -- Clonaid -- had created the first cloned human baby. "Eve" is said to have been created from an egg taken from a 31-year-old American woman whose husband was sterile, with the DNA from one of her own skin cells implanted in it. In January, Boisellier said "Eve" and her parents had relocated to Israel. Now, after a whirlwind trip here, Boisellier is heading onto Brazil for more human cloning. She says she�s met with baby "Eve" but, sadly, despite promises, was unable to persuade her parents to show her publicly.
Still, she had fresh dramatic headlines for local media: Some 50 couples, Jews and Palestinians who have lost children in the violence here, had beseeched her for help. Eighty percent of the unnamed parents, she later told me, wanted to create replicas of their loved ones. And while cloning cannot be done from dead cells, Boisellier was confident she�d be able to work with preserved cells of the deceased children that, she said, could be obtained from hospitals where they may have been admitted.
Belief in "Eve�s" arrival, though front-page news worldwide, was severely undercut by another side to the story. Since 1992, Boisellier, 46, has been a bishop in the Order of Angels of the Raelians, a sect based in Valcourt, Quebec, claiming worldwide membership of 50,000-60,000. Mellul, a Moroccan-born Israeli, is also a bishop. He�s the director of the Raelian Movement in Israel, which claims a membership of 200 and holds meetings on the first Saturday of each month in a Tel Aviv hotel.
The Raelian movement�s prophet is French ex-journalist Claude Vorilhon. He says that a midget green space alien he met in an extinct French volcano in 1973 told him that humans are descended from clones they left behind 25,000 years ago. (A complex Raelian theology explains the evolution from green man to human.) Standing outside his UFO, the alien, who called himself Yaweh, said that his fellow aliens, who had given their DNA for the clones, were the Elohim. The word, in the Hebrew Bible, means "God" and is construed as singular. According to Vorilhon, it really means "those who came from the sky".
Renamed by Yaweh, Vorilhon became His Holiness Rael. He took to wearing white satin padded suits. He advocated the dissolution of national borders and armies. He argued for government by geniuses; and for making possession of at least an average IQ a criteria for the right to vote. He also told his followers to engage in free love and to give tithes to the sect.
The controversy he sparked in France forced Vorhilon to relocate to Quebec, where his group was granted the status of a recognized religion. In 1997, spurred by the production of the first cloned sheep, Vorhilon threw his energies into cloning humans as a way of "honoring" the Elohim and creating eternal life. Clonaid was launched from a Bahamas address, although authorities there shut it down; the only known address now is Boisellier�s public relations base in Las Vegas.
Boisellier, Vorhilon�s leading scientific acolyte, took over the company in 1999. The "Eve" announcement garnered mega-publicity for Rael and turned her and Vorhilon into celebrities. Today, she employs six scientists and "many subcontractors and too many lawyers," she tells The Report, in one of a series of conversations by telephone, via e-mail and at the airport. As human cloning is banned in most countries, she won�t reveal the location of the company�s labs, saying only, "We are doing it in a country where it is not illegal."
As elsewhere, in Israel Boisellier was greeted by the media with a mix of curiosity and derision. Casting herself as a courageous pioneer, she compares cloning with in-vitro fertilization which, she says, "was also considered to be awful when it got started in the 1980s. Now there are over 200,000 children born in that manner."
But there�s another, underreported side to the Raelians. When pressed, they speak of an End of Days scenario, when the Elohim will rule and the unbelievers vanish, and they want Israel, inevitably, to play a role. For seven years, Mellul has been aggressively lobbying Israeli officials for the creation of a Raelian embassy in Jerusalem before the midget space aliens revisit Rael in about 2035. Mellul refers to the embassy as "a sort of Third Temple" -- indicating that one more element of traditional religion has been reworked as sci-fi in the Raelian faith.
Mellul has repeatedly written letters to the Prime Minister�s Office warning that Israel "will be destroyed" should another country accept the offer instead. "It will happen 21 days after the offer is accepted elsewhere," he snaps. No reply has been received.
The worldwide scientific community has watched with growing concern, even disgust, as the human cloning debate -- regarded as the most significant moral issue in modern medicine -- has been focused on what many believe is a band of publicity-seeking charlatans.
Cloning is a technically and ethically complex process, explains Prof. Shimon Glick, director of the Jacobowitz Center for Medical Ethics at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Technically, it involves taking a cell of the person to be cloned, extracting its nucleus, and injecting it into a donor ovum whose own DNA has been removed. An electric shock then causes the ovum to begin dividing to form an embryo, which is implanted in a surrogate mother.
That process, which would produce a nearly identical twin of the donor, is "most justifiably" banned in most countries, says Glick. "It hasn�t been proven safe or reliable and it is way too premature to consider. It took hundreds, if not thousands of experiments to get the Dolly project going. And there are serious moral questions involved in human cloning."
But, Glick notes, using related techniques to create stem cells to grow new tissue for transplants is legal in some countries, including Israel, where most bioethicists and halakhic experts are supportive. The Raelians, says Glick, may scare off public support for stem cell research.
Prof. Rivkah Carmi, a medical geneticist, agrees. While she doesn�t believe the Raelians have succeeded in cloning a human -- Boisellier has repeatedly reneged on promises to present proof of her company�s claim to have cloned five healthy babies -- Carmi says it can theoretically be done. "But it�s extremely dangerous. There could be birth defects. We must prevent irresponsible people from gaining access to labs."
Carmi is appalled Boisellier has been allowed to "prey upon parents who have lost children" in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. "Sadly, it�s the one part of the story that I do believe. These parents are desperate. It�s awful this hope has been given to them."
Till now, Boisellier says, Clonaid has "worked for free"; in July, however, "we will start charging." Each successfully cloned baby will cost $200,000. As for birth defects, Boisellier insists the Clonaid Five have none. "We have been cloning many species in our lab. It�s easier to clone human beings than other species. We have huge knowledge in assisted reproduction of humans thanks to IVF, and you haven�t heard about defects in test-tube babies."
I ask Boisellier, a chemist, if she�s not bothered by becoming a scientific joke. "I had to choose between my reputation and "Eve" and her parents. The choice was easy. They are my friends today and I will never force them to go public. I know how much they would lose and how hard it would be for them to live. There are people in the U.S. who are ready to give them problems. Remember, they are American citizens. "
"Eve�s" parents, says Boisellier, nearly agreed to bring the baby to a Tel Aviv news conference but changed their minds at the last minute because they "feared local authorities" -- even though "Eve" was not cloned here. Asked why none of the bereaved families who purportedly want to clone their children would come forward, Boisellier says, "I met them only a few days ago. Do you think at the first meeting I will ask them to talk with the press?" Indeed, Boisellier says, the parents insisted that "we sign nondisclosure agreements."
There were equal numbers of Jews and Arabs, she says. "All the families brought photographs and would speak about their loved ones. These meetings have always been emotional but also full of love. We spoke about life, future and science."
In the 1980s, Boisellier worked for French chemical giant Air Liquide and later taught chemistry at an upstate New York college. The Raelian association cost her; she was dismissed from Air Liquide, and lost custody of her youngest child in a divorce action. But she seems thrive on the publicity, leaping for her pocketbook and whisking out lipstick and hairbrush at the sight of a photographer. An older daughter, Marina, is a volunteer surrogate mother.
Leon Mellul�s French-born, non-Jewish Raelian-wife says part of the sect�s appeal is its encouragement of free love. As her husband disappears to escort Boisellier to a bathroom at an outdoor caf�, she shares the information that she and Leon have an open marriage, and says she�s genuinely happy when Leon has a new lover. Her personal dream, she laughs, "is to clone Leon in the body of a 17-year-old."
The Raelians attribute their views on sexual freedom to Rael�s report of his tour of the Elohim�s planet, where he says he encountered pink and blue squirrels, lunched with Muhammad and his "half-brothers" Jesus and Buddha and spent the night bathing and sleeping with six sexy female robots. Rael has also advertised over the Internet the sale of unfertilized human ova for implantation in infertile women, and a remote-control machine which allows women to trigger orgasms.
Before Boisellier boards her flight, she attracts the attention of airport security guards, who pepper her with questions about her visit. "Didn�t you see her on TV?" complains Mellul, irked by this perceived slight to his fellow Raelian bishop. They didn�t; Boisellier is politely but firmly marched off for questioning and luggage X-rays.
On her return, she�s calm and philosophical about her dual identities of scientist and religious leader. She�s an ex-Catholic, she says. "Other people believe that God had sex with a woman; that the Red Sea parted; that Christ walked on water. Believing that we were created by intelligent extraterrestrials who believe in science," she chuckles, "is a lot more rational."
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