Copyright 2002 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company The Houston Chronicle
December 28, 2002, Saturday 3 STAR
EDITION
SECTION: A; Pg. 29 MetFront
LENGTH: 516 words
HEADLINE: As a
chemistry grad student at UH, Boisselier was hardly controversial
SOURCE: Staff
BYLINE: ALLAN TURNER
BODY: Electron transfer reactions were Brigitte Boisselier's passion. And as
she spent long hours in a University of Houston chemistry lab, there was little
to suggest that the French-born graduate student would someday lead the charge
into the fiercely disputed realm of human cloning.
Boisselier, 47, said Friday her company, an offshoot of an
international religious cult that believes humans were created by space aliens,
had successfully cloned the first human.
The child -
named Eve - was born to an unidentified, infertile American couple, and is the
first of five cloned children to be born in the next few weeks, Boisselier said.
Tests to verify that Eve is a true clone should be completed in about a week.
No one could be more surprised than UH chemistry professor
Carl Kadish, who was Boisselier's thesis adviser in the mid-1980s.
"Presumably all of that came later," he said of her
emergence as a cloning expert. "She had no biochemistry in her degree from the
University of Houston."
Kadish, who met Boisselier when
she was a graduate student in France and he was a Fulbright instructor in
Germany, described her as "a good student."
"She
concentrated on her studies," he said. "There was nothing out of the
ordinary."
Boisselier received her doctorate in
analytical chemistry in 1985.
How Boisselier became
associated with the extraterrestrial cult founded by former French journalist
Claude Vorilhon is unclear. She could not be reached at her Clinton, N.Y., home
Friday.
But by 2001, Boisselier had left her job as a
biochemistry teacher at Hamilton College in New York to become an official of
Bahamas-based Clonaid.
The company also operates
Clonapet, a service for cloning companion animals, and Insureaclone, which
preserves DNA from clients for use in cloning.
As early
as 2001, Boisselier told National Academy of Sciences members that her company
was experimenting with human cloning.
In March of that
year, she told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that
during the previous eight months, Clonaid had received "thousands of requests
from individuals or couples who are eagerly waiting for the public announcement
of our success."
"These individuals are homosexual
couples, individuals without a partner and mainly infertile couples who have
been through all possible infertility methods and who cannot have a baby with
their own genes except through the cloning method.
"These requests come from . . . every continent, every culture, every
religion. The desire to give birth to a child bearing our genes is probably
written in our genes."
Boisselier concluded her appeal
to congressmen by asking them to "secure two basic freedoms - the freedom of
scientific inquiry and the freedom to make personal reproduction choices."
Congress has not restricted human cloning, but the federal
Food and Drug Administration claims it must approve all such experiments. A
number of nations have banned the practice.
Boisselier
has at least one child, a daughter who reportedly will be used as a surrogate
mother in a cloning procedure.
Document 57 of 494. 