The Strange Tale Of A Baby Called Eve

December 27, 2002

A woman stepped before television cameras in Hollywood, Florida, and announced something incredible. The most extraordinary achievement in human history. The birth of the first cloned human.

Her name was Eve, and she was a healthy seven-pound baby girl, delivered by Caesarean section the previous day at an undisclosed location outside of the United States.

According to the woman making the announcement, Eve was an exact copy of her 31-year-old American mother. And if true, the implications would have been staggering.

Human beings had done something previously only seen in science fiction. Reproducing ourselves through cloning was no longer theoretical. The story would get more interesting.

The organization that claimed responsibility wasn’t Harvard, Johns Hopkins, or some prestigious biotechnology laboratory. It was a company known as Clonaid.

The founder of Clonaid was also the leader of a religious movement known as the Raelians; it was their belief that extraterrestrials had created humanity through genetic engineering. Going a step further, its founder claimed to have personally encountered these “alien creators.”

One problem was left to solve before the world would believe in the incredible claims. Nobody outside of Clonaid had seen the baby, and nobody could independently establish that she existed.

Where the Story Begins

To understand how this amazing tale unfolded, we have to go back to France in 1973. Claude Vorilhon, who was a French journalist and former racing driver, claimed he’d had an encounter with an extraterrestrial near a volcanic region in central France.

According to Vorilhon, the visitor explained that human beings had not been created through divine intervention. Instead, humanity was supposedly the product of advanced extraterrestrials known as the Elohim, and they engineered life on Earth.

Vorilhon adopted the name Raël and founded what became known as the Raëlian Movement. His teachings combined extraterrestrial creation, genetic engineering, and the possibility that sufficiently advanced science could eventually overcome death itself.

To most scientists, these claims had no credible evidentiary foundation. But Vorilhon attracted followers. And in the 1990s, an actual breakthrough gave his movement an extraordinary new opportunity.

Dolly The Sheep Changed Everything

In February of 1997, the world learned about Dolly. Dolly was the sheep successfully cloned from an adult cell by researchers at Scotland’s Roslin Institute. Dolly wasn’t the first cloned animal. But she represented something: an enormous scientific milestone had been achieved.

For the first time, scientists had proven that a cell taken from an adult mammal could be used to produce another living mammal. Suddenly human reproductive cloning no longer sounded quite so impossible. It was that year when Raël founded Clonaid, an entire organization promoting human cloning services.

The movement's ambitions went well beyond helping people reproduce. Its broader philosophy envisioned a future in which cloning and other technologies might help human beings find a form of immortality.

The connection between an extraterrestrial creation story and cutting-edge biotechnology might sound like the premise of an unusual science-fiction film. But by the end of 2002, Clonaid was about to be international news.

The Announcement that Shocked the World

For a time, this was a regular thing you’d find in any Associated Press story.

Brigitte Boisselier was a chemist, a senior member of the Raëlian Movement, and the public face of Clonaid. And at a packed Florida news conference, she announced that her organization had successfully produced the first cloned human baby. You can watch the announcement here.

The child, she claimed, had been born on December 26. Her mother had reportedly given the genetic material used to create the embryo, carried the pregnancy, and delivered the child.

Boisselier explained they used a cloning procedure involving the transfer of genetic material from a skin cell into an egg whose own nuclear genetic material had been removed. It had been the same general approach as was used to clone Dolly the sheep.

Scientists worldwide expressed skepticism. Religious leaders raised objections. And officials from multiple governments wanted answers. And reporters asked the obvious questions.

• Where was Eve?

• Who were the scientists involved?

• Where had the procedure been performed?

• Could anyone examine the child?

At that time, Boisselier declined to disclose the location of the birth or identify the scientists. She provided no independently authenticated photos, genetic results, or medical documentation establishing that a cloned baby had been born.

However, she offered something that at the time appeared promising. Independent DNA testing. Within a week, she suggested the world would have its proof. And that promise is perhaps where the story takes a most intriguing turn.

The DNA Test That Never Happened

Michael Guillen, a former science editor for ABC News, agreed to arrange independent testing of the alleged baby and her mother. It was a straightforward objective. Qualified experts would collect genetic samples and determine whether the child’s DNA supported Clonaid’s claims.

If confirmed, the findings would have changed science forever. But the promised verification soon ran into problems. Clonaid would soon begin backing away from the original timetable.

Allegedly, the baby’s parents had become concerned about legal proceedings in Florida that might threaten their custody of the child. It was reported that a Florida attorney had sought court intervention over concerns about the child’s welfare. And Clonaid maintained that protecting the family’s privacy and safety had become its priority.

If so, that’s all reasonable and fair.

Then, on January 6, 2003, it was announced that Guillen had suspended efforts to verify the story. His assembled team had not been granted access to the child or her family. Without samples, there could be no independent tests. He later acknowledged that an elaborate publicity hoax was a possibility.

As suddenly as it had dominated the international headlines, the story was back where it started. It was an extraordinary claim without verifiable evidence. But it didn’t stop with that.

More Clones

The story didn’t end with Baby Eve. Clonaid later claimed additional cloned births. (From the time period, I seem to remember it being in the area of 100)

In January of 2003, Boisselier discussed another alleged birth involving a lesbian couple in Europe. The organization would eventually claim multiple cloned children had been produced. But the central problem remained the same. Where was the evidence?

A March 2003 Congressional Research Service report documented the original announcement and noted that promised genetic tests had not been released. Clonaid’s additional claims also remained unproven.

The company had captured the world’s attention, but it had not delivered the independently verifiable scientific results needed to establish its achievement. The National Human Genome Research Institute would later summarize the controversy in its educational material on cloning.

Despite repeated requests, Clonaid never produced evidence confirming Even or the other human clones it claimed to have created. But it's what happened elsewhere that might have kept the story interesting.

By 2002, Clonaid had been ordered by the FDA to halt the lab when a Charleston lawyer paid a half-million to have his lost son cloned. But the organization at that point, the Raelians, claimed to have 130,000 members in 120 nations.

And by 2005, after years of debate, the United Nations and 84 countries agreed to a nonbinding statement condemning human cloning experimentation. The non-binding statement was largely supported by Roman Catholic countries and opposed by countries with active embryonic stem cell programs.

Between attempts to ban it internationally and the church, human cloning as a subject of study quickly became an international interest.

So, Where Is Eve

If it were true, and Clonaid did clone a child named Eve, she would turn 24 in December of 2026. Think about that for a moment, particularly if your wife, girlfriend, best friend, or colleague is having a birthday this December and is turning 24.

The allegedly first cloned human would now be an adult. She would have grown up during the rise of smartphones, social media, genetic testing, and technologies that would have seemed incredible when her birth was announced to the world.

Yet, this historic claim remains unproven. There’s no independently authenticated DNA evidence establishing that Clonaid produced the world’s first human clone.

The mystery continues to intrigue. But the greatest mystery might be something nobody’s really talking about.

Reasons Why The World Didn’t Want To Believe

Imagine, if you will. We are 24 years away from the day a company may have cloned a human. Then, they went on to clone others. Whether it was 13 or thousands, we may never really know.

But it was proven. Where do we stand today? What did that do to the faith people have?

Whether it was the Hebrews, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Muslims, or the Jewish people, what were they left to believe in if Vorhillon had proven that he learned how to clone people from the same race of extraterrestrials that populated the Earth?

The entire book of creation, beliefs in how we came to be, would have been rewritten over the past 24 years. And for millions, especially in this harsh and unforgiving world, that would have been life-shattering.