Deadline passes with no proof of human clone

A self-imposed deadline has passed for the company that claims to have produced the world’s first cloned human.

No independent witnesses have seen the baby girl, and promised DNA tests have still not been carried out.

The journalist who said he would supervise those tests has backed out of the project, saying there was a chance it was all “an elaborate hoax”.

Clonaid, the company that announced the birth on December 27, said the parents of baby Eve have refused to allow the tests.

Clonaid was founded by the Raelian sect, a group that believes space aliens created life on Earth.

“The team of scientists has had no access to the alleged family and therefore cannot verify first-hand the claim that a human baby has been cloned,” said Michael Guillen, the former science editor for ABC television news who offered to arrange the tests.

But experts said they were not surprised because Clonaid has never had any credibility with the scientific community.

“We have been ignoring it because we do not view it as a scientifically valid statement,” said Natalie Dewitt of Nature, the British science journal that published the milestone data on Dolly the cloned sheep in 1997.

“We don’t find it surprising that they are not in a position to offer any data,” said Sean Tipton of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

Clonaid chief executive Brigitte Boisselier has accepted that independent DNA testing is needed to make their cloning claims credible.

But Guillen said he was suspending his team of experts after failing to get access to Eve or her family.

“It is still entirely possible Clonaid’s announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raelian movement,” he said.

He said the team remained ready to proceed with the tests if circumstances changed.

Guillen has come under fire for allegedly trying to sell exclusive coverage of Clonaid’s first baby to the major US television networks.

He has denied having any link to the company, but has said he was interested in doing a documentary on human cloning that would involve Clonaid’s work.

He said he has covered all the “principal players” in human cloning since news broke of Dolly the sheep.

Some scientists said Clonaid’s two weeks of notoriety will probably not do lasting damage to legitimate reproductive research.

But others said it was a “big mistake” for the company to have been included with legitimate scientists in congressional hearings and other science policy forums over the past year.

“By association, they have done some damage,” Dewitt said. “But they are so far removed from legitimate science that I don’t think it will cause a huge problem.”