Cloning for dollars: sordid tales of hard-sell tactics

“I can measure the motions of heavenly bodies,” Sir Isaac Newton once wrote, “but I cannot measure human folly.”

In fact, if the greatest of natural philosophers had been asked to calculate the foolishness involved in the ongoing clone con, he probably would have shredded his wig in frustration.

Since Dec. 27, when a crackpot cult, run by a former French sportswriter who says he chats with extraterrestrials, first alleged it had cloned a human infant, the whole affair has slid from silly to sordid.

Silly is when the unproved claims of Brigitte Boisselier, the Raelian “bishop” who heads Clonaid, the company that now claims to have cloned two babies, are treated as newsworthy. Sordid describes the turn events have taken during the last few days, as it has emerged that freelance journalists acting as intermediaries for the Raelians and two other aspiring cloners have for months been trying to peddle variations on the story to mainstream news operations for large sums of money.

On Monday, one of these entrepreneurs, a former ABC News science editor, Michael A. Guillen, said he was stepping back from the group: “It’s still entirely possible Clonaid’s announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raelian movement.” No rush to judgment there. In any case, the cult’s published pronouncements on other topics should have been enough to wave any rational person off.

When Boisselier announced the birth of the first infant, she said her company’s claims would be independently verified by Guillen, who appeared with her at a Miami press conference. Clonaid has never made any bones about its intention to charge grieving parents, desperately infertile couples and the merely deluded hundreds of thousands of dollars for the babies it says it can clone. But, as the Wall Street Journal now has reported, the purportedly independent Guillen also has an exclusive deal with Clonaid and, in the weeks leading up to the first announcement, was pitching costly co-productions of the company’s story to the leading U.S. television networks.

Several months ago, according to a report in the New York Times, Guillen tried to sell a so-called reality-based program on the cult’s cloning efforts to Fox Entertainment. Executives there passed, reportedly because the project seemed “loaded with ethical questions,” the Times quoted an unnamed Fox executive as saying. (One tries to imagine what sort of proposal would raise ethical issues in the minds of Fox Entertainment executives, and the images that come to mind would make a vulture gag.) Fox News also declined Guillen’s proposal to produce a documentary for six-figure payments, as did ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and HBO, according to the New York Times.

Last May, in fact, Guillen approached the New York Times and offered to sell another “exclusive” cloning story, this one involving patients of would-be cloner Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, a Lexington, Ky., fertility specialist. The paper declined, but as the Journal reported Monday, Zavos has his own exclusive agreement with a British documentary filmmaker and now demands as much as $2,000 from journalists seeking interviews.

Meanwhile, in Italy, where Zavos’ estranged collaborator, Dr. Severino Antinori, says he will shortly produce a cloned infant, another freelance journalist offers to arrange interviews with the soon-to-be-great man for a mere $100,000. If that seems a little steep, a written statement can be obtained for just 500 Euros, slightly more than $500.

Checkbook journalism is a nasty business, and reputable news organizations don’t engage in it because it encourages precisely the sort of fraud being perpetrated by the cloning con artists. The only thing being replicated here is the scam. As the Journal’s Antonio Regalado wrote Monday, “Each group has sought publicity, and in some cases, fees from scoop-seeking reporters. Now the question is to what degree reporters’ eagerness to be first with a report from a secret human-cloning lab is shaping, and possibly fueling, the groups’ activities.”

Perhaps because they’re so busy fending off commercial propositions from the Raelians’ journalistic fellow-travelers, the mainstream press hasn’t spent much time looking into what it is the cult believes, apart from cloning’s potential blessings. As it turns out, their leader, ex-sportswriter Claude Vorilhon, has thoughts about all sorts of contemporary issues. Hints about their nature are sprinkled across the cult’s kitschy Web site, whose catchiest feature is an animated “re-creation” of the founder’s 1973 conversation with a space alien. (Fans of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” may recognize the ship.) Follow the hints a little more deeply, into Vorilhon’s published lectures, and some interesting material emerges.

Here, for example, is what he had to say last April about the United States in a talk ostensibly devoted to the desirability of a nonviolent solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

“Those who commit suicide by wrapping a bomb around their waist like those who drop bombs from an airplane practice the same type of terrorism. The greatest act of terrorism was committed by the country that claims to fight it, the one that dropped a bomb over Hiroshima, thus killing 10 times more people than the WTC tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and exactly the same type of targets and victims.”

In the same address, Vorilhon said this about Israel:

“Israel is engaged in state terrorism.... These are the descendants of those who suffered from Nazi crimes. They are setting the ‘Final Solution’ in motion: to push back all Arabs. And in doing so, they betray their ancestors by wanting to lock up Arabs in concentration camps. In fact, this is already happening.”

At another point in that lecture, Vorilhon alleged that the United States had brought upon itself the hatred of Islamic people around the world by refusing to intervene militarily on behalf of the Palestinians, as it did to protect the Muslim Kosovars in the Balkans:

America “intervened in Serbia but not Palestine. Why? Because the U.S. is held hostage by Jewish Americans.... A small handful of the millions of American Jews are holding the rest of the 250 million Americans hostage through the powerful grip their lobby has on elections.”

The devout Muslims among the Palestinians, however, may not find Rael -- that’s the alias Vorilhon has adopted -- much of an ally. Here is what he had to say about Islam a few days after the Sept 11 attacks:

“The Koran asks Muslims to kill or abduct all those who refuse to become members of their belief. This is the precise and official text given by their ‘prophet.’... Islam officially encourages racism and discrimination.”

The self-styled “Messenger of Infinity” has equally harsh views concerning Catholicism, and his cult maintains a separate “apostasy” Web site that advises disaffected Catholics to demand in writing that the diocese in which they were christened destroy their baptismal certificates. (The sect denounces both circumcision and infant baptism as violations of human rights.) In Canada’s Quebec province, where the Raelians now have their headquarters -- in a theme park called UFOland, actually -- cultists have handed out fliers inviting Catholic schoolchildren to begin the process of apostasy by burning the tiny wooden crucifix enclosed.

“The Vatican and its laws are every bit as bad as the Talibans,” according to one of the sect’s messages.

As all this suggests, neither the Raelians nor their white-robed prophet (was there ever any other kind?) are quite the amusingly wacky pranksters they may appear to be. This is sinister thinking, and thoughts of this kind ultimately have consequences.

The best that can be said of this whole shabby affair is that while some in the press still seem prepared to swallow whatever the cult feeds them, neither the cloners nor their fans seem likely to drink the Kool-Aid unless they’re paid.