Florida attorney Bernard Siegel tried to appoint a special guardian for Eve and threatened to sue Clonaid, because he was afraid that the child might be treated like a lab rat.
[3] Bioethicist Clara Alto condemned Clonaid for premature human experimentation and noted the high incidence of malformations and thousands of fetal deaths in animal cloning.
[4] On May 31, 1997, an issue of the popular science magazine New Scientist said that the International Raëlian Movement was starting a company to fund the research and development of human cloning.
[6] On June 9, 1997, Clonaid stated its intention to offer homosexual and/or infertile couples the chance to have a genetically identical child and take a step toward immortality.
According to an Internet announcement, the Raëlian leader and a group of investors founded a company in the Bahamas and called it Valiant Venture Ltd., whose project mission was named Clonaid.
[8] Claude Vorilhon held a meeting in a Montreal hotel on September 21, 2000, where he announced that a wealthy American couple was willing to fund the Clonaid project.
[9] Lee Silver, a molecular biologist from Princeton University, noted the advantages that Raëlians had, as a pro-cloning religious group, in finding willing surrogates.
[9] Brigitte Boisselier anticipated that the work could begin on the preserved cells as soon as October, but there was no evidence that Clonaid had medical knowledge necessary for its success.
[citation needed] In the spring of 2001,[10] the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations inspected Clonaid's lab in the small city of Nitro in West Virginia.
Staff scientists reviewed the lab's research documentation and found them inadequate, the work of a graduate student extracting ovum from cow ovaries from a slaughterhouse.
The FDA said that the equipment in lab was state-of-the-art and had been bought by Mark Hunt, a former West Virginia state legislator, who wanted to clone his 10-month-old son, Andrew, who died in 1999 due to congenital heart disease.
Following investigation of the West Virginia lab, Mark Hunt made an agreement with the FDA-OCI to not clone his dead son within the United States.
FDA biotechnology chief Dr. Phil Noguchi warned that the human cloning, even if it worked, risked transferring sexually transmitted diseases to the newly born child.
[4] Panos Zavos, a former professor of the University of Kentucky, at the time had plans to create human clone embryos, but he stated to the effect that Clonaid's claims were without merit and that Eve did not exist.
[16] University of Wisconsin–Madison bioethicist Alta Charo said that even in other ape-like mammals, the risk for miscarriage, birth defects, and life problems remains high.
[4] Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed concerns that many dead and sick children could result from the cloning of human beings.
[16] Clonaid spokeswoman Nadine Gary claimed that Eve went home with her mother on December 30, 2002,[17] but Florida attorney Bernard Siegel filed a petition as a private citizen[18] in the Broward County Circuit Court requesting that a temporary guardian be appointed for the purported cloned child.
[citation needed] As the court case played out over the next month, Dr. Boisselier testified under oath that there was a cloned child born outside of the U.S. living in Israel.
[20] Michael Guillen, a former ABC News science editor, made an agreement with Boisselier for him to choose independent experts to test for a DNA match.
Boisselier argued that failed attempts at human cloning would be like those of in vitro fertilization where early miscarriages occurred more frequently than abortions.
[26] On January 5, 2003, Brigitte Boisselier said to the BBC that her medical team produced hundreds of human clone embryos before proceeding to ten implantations, two of which led to births.
The head of the UK Roslin Institute was critical of the assertion, "Clonaid [has] no track record but claim[s] to have cloned hundreds of embryos – it just doesn't ring true.
"[27] A Raëlian spokeswoman from Japan[23] claimed that a baby boy, cloned from a comatose two-year-old of a Japanese couple, was born the previous day.
[28] According to Boisselier, Mark and Tracy Hunt, who were seeking to clone their dead son, invested $500,000 in the former Clonaid lab in West Virginia and its equipment, which the Food and Drug Administration shut down.
However, in the week of September 27, 2002, South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare announced that it would ban human cloning and sentence violators to a 10-year prison term.
[35] Clonaid, a human cloning firm, has established an affiliate company in Korea, participants at the International Bio Expo in Japan said Thursday.
The sources in Japan said that the RMX2010 allegedly creates a stable electronic pulse required to develop human embryos to the blastocyst stage.
These included Lord Robert Winston,[38] head of the IVF research team at London's Hammersmith Hospital, and Tanja Dominko[39] of the Oregon Regional Primate Center's monkey cloning project.