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Guns, Germs, and Clones
by Brandon Keim

In the hyperaccelerated cycle of modern news culture, where even the most gripping stories have the life expectancy of a mayfly hatch or boy band, the now-discredited birth of a cloned baby girl in the waning days of 2002 has already faded from the public mind. Though it happened recently, the story already feels dated; yet this distance seems well suited for so surreal an affair.

The supposed clone, nicknamed Eve, was brought into the world via a Caesarian section on December 26 — thankfully sparing us the metaphorical dissonance of a clone on Christmas — by Clonaid, a Bahamian company affiliated with the infamous Raelian sect. At first it was believed that the delivery took place at a hospital in Serbia, but this was quickly reclassified as an 'undisclosed overseas location.' There was, however, no question about the identity of the Raelians, founded in 1973 by French racecar driver Claude Vorilhon, who claimed to have met an alien atop a volcano in southeastern France, boarded the alien's ship, and frolicked with voluptuous female robots before learning that the human race was descended from clones of a spacefaring race called the Elohim.

Clonaid's announcement was met with widespread skepticism and
condemnation, especially from scientists involved in the still-experimental field of "therapeutic" cloning, who feared the public would confuse their efforts with those of lunatics. Indeed, forty eight bills to ban or regulate cloning have been introduced in state legislatures and Congress since December, with the Raelian’s annoucement providing a momentum lacking last year when a full cloning ban stalled in the Senate.

However, while its political consequences will be important, it was difficult to get worked up about the Raelian hoax. Isolated cloning stunts just don’t stand out from the daily background madness of life in the United States: the madness of terrorism, the madness of the war on terrorism, the apparently endless implosion of our economy, North Korea threatening to develop and use nuclear weapons, President Bush threatening to use them “preemptively,” the threat of war on Iraq — all of which is, to put it gently, distracting.

Recently White House officials raised the national threat level from Yellow to Orange, signifying a “high risk of terrorist attack.” Anxiety manifested itself in the national consciousness as fear of a biological weapons strike; pictures of gas masks peered eerily from the front pages of newspapers, and evening newscasts reported widespread shortages of duct tape and plastic sheeting, though such measures would do little against most biological agents. Meanwhile, the more cynical remembered how, in the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration allotted more money for corporate tax refunds than bioterrorism response; others took a historical look at how we arrived at a point when the comparative lethality of smallpox and tularemia are fodder for Sunday morning news shows.

Amidst all this we are proud to offer you articles by Susan Wright and Laurie Vollen, two leading experts on biological warfare. Susan describes the international community’s failure to contain the spread of bioweapons; Laurie discusses what is being done to protect us. Neither paints a pretty picture, but both have clear ideas about what could and should be done. Their wise and practical words are an antidote to the spreading epidemic of fear.

Of course, the workings of the world do not stop simply because our attention is focused elsewhere. We are also pleased to begin a three-part series from renowned journalist and activist Devinder Sharma, who writes about trade, agriculture, and the plight of the world’s poor.

GeneWatch would like to apologize for omitting the biography of Chloe Silverman, co-author of “Autism and Genetics: Genes Are Not The Cause of an Emerging Epidemic,” which appeared in GeneWatch Volume 16 Number 1. Chloe is a graduate student in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.