Washington — Two groups of scientists Wednesday testified that they were gearing up to clone human beings in secret laboratories and that they saw nothing illegal in their quest.
However, they did say that they had received warning letters from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday. The contents of those letters were not disclosed.
But Kathryn Zoon, director of biologics evaluation and research for the FDA, said people who undertake experiments deemed unsafe could be subject to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa., called the hearing to consider the need for a law banning human cloning.
"Although publicly funded human cloning research is prohibited, privately funded human cloning research is not," said Greenwood, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Oversight and Investigation subcommittee.
Panos Zavos, a fertility specialist who recently left the University of Kentucky, told the subcommittee that he expects to create a human clone within two years in a laboratory outside the United States.
"Those who want to ban this (cloning) would have stopped Neil Armstrong from flying to the moon and banned Columbus from discovering America," he said.
And Brigette Boisselier, a chemist and chief scientist for the Canadian group Clonaid, said it was preparing to create a clone from the cells of a child who had died. The work, she said, was being done at a secret laboratory somewhere in the continental United States.
Clonaid is run by a religious order known as Raelians who believe that humans were cloned thousands of years ago by extraterrestrials.
Boisselier read a letter at the hearing from the child's father. She said he paid $500,000 for the procedure and asked that his name not be revealed.
She read, "I decided I would never give up on my child. I knew we only had one chance human cloning."
Others, however, testified that any children created through cloning would likely have serious defects.
Rudolph Jaenisch, who clones mice at MIT's Whitehead Institute, said that efforts to clone a human would almost certainly result in hundreds of miscarriages, stillbirths, infant deaths, and children with serious heart, kidney and brain defects. "I believe there probably isn't a normal clone around," he said, referring to the animals cloned so far.
The cloned sheep, Dolly, he said, may not have had perfect brain function "You don't need that much brainpower to graze in the field."
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