Global religious cult offers cloning services

GENEVA (Reuter) - A Swiss-based religious cult is launching a company to offer infertile or homosexual couples the chance to have a child cloned from one of them -- and to help mankind reach ``eternal life,'' it became known Sunday.

The company, called Valiant Venture Ltd., is centered in the Bahamas and was launched by the leader of the worldwide Raelian Movement and a group of investors and the service is to be called ``Clonaid,'' according to an announcement on the Internet.

Valiant Venture, expecting to have over a million customers, ``plans to build a laboratory in a country where human cloning is not illegal and will offer its services to wealthy parents worldwide,'' the undated announcement said.

The company would also offer another service known as ``Insuraclone'' which for $50,000 would provide safe storage of cells from a living child or any other``beloved person'' to allow for creation of a clone in case of death.

The Raelian Movement, which asserts that life on earth was created in laboratories by extra-terrestrials known as the Elohim, was launched in the 1970s by a Frenchman who calls himself Rael and says he was contacted by the Elohim.

It claims to have some 35,000 members in 85 countries, with regional centers in Montreal for the Americas, Abidjan for Africa and Tokyo for Asia, with its overall headquarters in Geneva, according to its own Internet site.

The site provides a postbox address, but it is not listed in the Geneva telephone book and telephone operators said they had no number for it. But Rael frequently addresses public conferences in the international city.

The Internet page advertising the new company said Clonaid services would be offered at a charge ``as low as $200,000.'' The company would initially sub-contract existing laboratories to carry out the cloning operations. ``The company may also sponsor American laboratories working on human cloning and whose government subsidies have been cut by President Clinton,'' said the announcement, headed: ``Rael creates the first human cloning company.''

The page gave a telephone and a fax number in the United States of a biologist, Marc Rivard, for potential customers.

Saturday, a U.S., bioethics panel recommended that Congress enact legislation to ban the cloning of entire human beings for now but allow the cloning of human embryos for private scientific research.

Earlier this year, Clinton extended a 1994 prohibition on government-funded human embryo research to include federal funding of human cloning work.

Other countries have banned, or are preparing to ban or severely restrict, cloning research on human embryos following a wave of concern after a Scottish scientist announced earlier this year he had successfully cloned a sheep.

Attention to the Raelian announcement was drawn Sunday by the Zurich German-language newspaper Sonntagszeitung, which quoted Swiss parliamentarians -- about to discuss a bill on cloning -- as expressing outrage at Clonaid.

``The offer is monstrous,'' it quoted Monika Weber, a Zurich member of the upper house of the Swiss legislature in Berne as saying. It also cited a Swiss expert on sects, Hugo Stamm, as saying members of the Raelian movement ``have money.''

In a comment accompanying the announcement on the Internet page, Rael said ``cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life,'' adding: ``The next step....will be to directly clone an adult person without having to go through the growth process and to transfer memory and personality in this person.''

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