Dr. Hwang needs some help. And who better than space aliens. Enter the Raelians (not to be confused with the RAE). The funky UFO cult, which calls itself ever so appropriately “the intelligent designers,” (CLICK HERE for a helpful video!) worship some French sports journalist/race car driver’s vision of heaven-through-cloning.
Although they claim otherwise, they are also the utter and total sponsors of a lunatic fringe cloning group called Clonaid, a Bahamas-based group that claims to have cloned “baby Eve. Clonaid is run by Raelian Brigitte Boisselier, the brainpower behind their decade-old quest to clone somebody, anybody. If you follow or work in bioethics you will recall that the Raelians kept everyone with any scholarly work in the area of reproductive genetics completely transfixed and horrified for the better part of three years until they failed to produce the baby Eve, and at last people started to realize that they were nutty.
Anyway they are hoping to recruit Dr. Hwang to join in their efforts. Please, someone send this story to Jon Stewart.
[thanks Art Caplan]