Raelian Movement Mulling Plans for ‘Macaqaid’–the First Monkey-Cloning Company?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on November 14, 2007 at 5:17 AM PT
Great news for the Raelian (read: UFO cult)-run Clonaid™. Scientists have made a breakthrough that may someday give the First Human Cloning Company a real, honest-to-goodness business model.
Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center said this week that they had, for the first time, generated embryonic clones from a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque and then used those to produce colonies of embryonic stem cells. To achieve this, they injected the genetic material from a skin cell of an adult monkey into a monkey egg whose own DNA had been removed, extracting embryonic stem cells from the resulting early-stage embryo.
Quite an achievement and one that could speed advances in therapeutic cloning, if the techniques on which it’s based can be applied to human cells. “This opens doors to human embryonic cloning,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Not the most efficient procedure but there it is, it opens that door. I’m not sure we knew before that people and primates were cloneable. But what works in monkeys will work in us.”
Comments
The Raelian Movement has not made any announcement regarding a monkey cloning company contrary to what is being said in a story titled “Raelian Movement announces Macaqaid – the first monkey cloning company” on November 14, 2007 in Digital Daily.
The Raelian Movement is a philosophical movement in strong support of all new technologies, cloning being one of them. However, the Raelian Movement only supports these new technologies from a philosophical/moral point of view and is not involved at all in any enterprise offering services or performing research in these fields.
Thomas Kaenzig
Director Media Relations, US Raelian Movement
http://www.rael.org
(See John Paczkowski’s clarification about Clonaid in the corrections section.)
Posted by Thomas Kaenzig at November 15th, 2007 at 1:28 pmIn your clarification titled “Raelian Movement Mulling Plans for ‘Macaqaid’–the First Monkey-Cloning Company?” you mention ” … the Raelians, proprietors of Clonaid … “.
The Clonaid project was indeed initiated back in 1997 by Rael who is the spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement. However, the project was fully handed over in 1999 to Dr Brigitte Boisselier who happens to be a Raelian and who leads this privately funded project by herself since many years and there are absolutely no financial links between Rael / the Raelian Movement on the one side and Clonaid on the other side. Neither Rael nor the Raelian Movement own a single percentage in the Clonaid project and Clonaid associated entities.
Again, Rael and the Raelian Movement only support the cloning technology from a philosophical point of view.
Thomas Kaenzig
Posted by Thomas Kaenzig at November 17th, 2007 at 2:27 amDirector Media Relations, US Raelian Movement
http://www.rael.org