A company's claim to have produced the world’s first cloned baby fell further into doubt when the man it had selected to confirm the child was a true clone said he had stopped working on the project.Michael Guillen, a former science editor for ABC News, said a team of scientists he had assembled to conduct DNA-testing had been denied access to the alleged cloned baby and her family. He said the cloning claim might be ‘‘part of an elaborate hoax.’’The decision means that, 11 days after causing a worldwide furore over the prospect of human cloning, the company has produced no names, photographs, scientific evidence or a process for obtaining data to verify its cloning claim. In fact, it has not even shown that a child was born.The Las Vegas-based company, Clonaid, which is affiliated with a religious group called the Raelian Movement, had announced the birth on December 27 and said it would provide proof by January 5 that the child was a clone.Critics of Clonaid said Guillen’s decision showed that the announcement was a hoax designed to gain publicity for the Raelians, who have a decade-long history of developing schemes to win media coverage, in part to attract members. Since announcing the birth, Clonaid and the Raelians, who believe that all life on Earth was created by scientists from another planet, have received hours of exposure on television news programmes and have been the subjects of hundreds of newspaper articles.‘‘I think we’ve all been had,’’ said Dr Robert Lanza, vice-president for scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology Inc., a Worcester, Mass., company that is using cloning techniques in disease research. An independent DNA test ‘‘was their last chance for any credibility, and I think we’re at the point where they have absolutely no credibility left,’’ Lanza said. ‘‘This story has been losing altitude like a bowling ball going down a flight of stairs,’’ said Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research. ‘‘This reduces their credibility to less than zero.’’Clonaid has said that parents of the reputed clone, nicknamed Eve, were having second thoughts about a DNA test because a Florida lawyer had asked a court to appoint a guardian for the baby. The parents fear that a DNA test could aid the lawyer’s case, the company said.Clonaid said all of Eve’s genes had come from her mother — an unidentified woman who first donated DNA to make a cloned embryo and then carried the embryo to term. A DNA test could prove that the child was a true clone by showing that portions of the baby’s DNA matched those of the mother.In a written statement, Guillen said: ‘‘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. In other words, it’s still entirely possible Clonaid’s announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raelian movement.’’ (LATWP)
