Profile of Brigitte Boisselier

By Bryn Nelson | Newsday staff writer

Clinton, N.Y. - This story originally ran in Newsday on April 22, 2001

It's three days before Easter, and the sun is hinting at an appearance after what has seemed to the local residents like a dismal eternity of rain and gray. The few remaining piles of dirty snow have been relegated to ditches along the steep portion of College Hill Road that leads up to Hamilton College, and for a moment, the only reminder of a raging ethical storm here is the silver pendant dangling from Brigitte Boisselier's neck.

Boisselier, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at the college, smiles graciously and apologizes for being late. She has emerged from her Jeep Cherokee Sport dressed in stylish black boots, tan slacks, a cream-colored knitted coat, and a black scarf draped under hair that begins a bit reddish and quickly turns very black before spilling past her shoulders.

Her silver pendant mimics the Star of David, with added swirls meeting at the center to represent the eternity of time and matter. It identifies Boisselier as a Raelian, one of between 25,000 and 55,000 members of a sect whose religion is science. But perhaps more importantly, it intimates her belief that humans were created through the intelligent design of extraterrestrials, and her belief that a continuation of the creative cycle and the secret of eternal life itself can be revealed by cloning a baby boy.

Oh, they will clone others, she says. But the baby boy, a 10- month-old child who died during a botched operation to fix his faulty heart, will be first. His grieving parents, who wish to remain anonymous, have provided $500,000 to fund the first year of the cloning project, dubbed Clonaid, now estimated to cost more than $1 million. Boisselier has assumed the mantle of scientific director, and 55 Raelian women have volunteered as surrogate mothers to help defy the low probability of success.

"I feel that cloning is right, that science is right as long as we use it to do good, and that's been my thought for a long, long time," Boisselier says.

On the other hand, Hamilton College's faculty and 1,740 students have had little time to adjust to the media maelstrom since news of Boisselier's cloning interests came to light in February through two independently published magazine articles.

"I think there was no question there was a great deal of surprise and then trying to figure out what it all means," says college spokesman Mike Debraggio. "All of a sudden, this is not only here, but we have someone on campus who is a leading proponent."

Boisselier has decided to resign from her post as chemistry professor in May to focus on her primary passion, the Clonaid project. But her impact on the college will linger long afterward.

In 1997, Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut introduced Dolly the sheep- the first clone of an adult mammal-to an uneasy public. During the cloning process, Wilmut and his team of scientists replaced the nucleus in a sheep's unfertilized egg, or ovum, with a nucleus from an adult sheep's mammary gland. Then they coaxed the egg to begin dividing as if it had been fertilized, tricking the donor nucleus into resetting its genes precisely to their early embryonic states and allowing the resulting sheep embryo to be implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother. Human cloning would work in much the same way to produce an identical genetic copy of a person, although differing environmental conditions would ensure that the clone would still retain unique characteristics.

But even Wilmut and other cloning pioneers such as Rudolf Jaenisch have blasted the idea of performing the feat on humans.

"I think it's outrageous," says Jaenisch, reached by telephone at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. "I think it's reckless and irresponsible to even consider human cloning at this stage."

As a Raelian, Boisselier says she was thrilled to hear about Dolly, because it meant that human cloning was imminent, as foretold by the French prophet Rael, the movement's spiritual leader and a former race car driver. In recent weeks, Rael has issued press releases supporting brain transplants, the trading of unfertilized human eggs over the Internet, and a remote-controlled device that supposedly allows women to trigger orgasms at will.

Boisselier admits that when she first heard the Raelian creation story in 1992, some 20 years after the movement began, it sounded strange to her. Raelians believe the Hebrew word "Elohim" has been mistranslated as "God," but actually refers to "those who came from the sky" and created humans in their image through genetic engineering. Jesus, they say, was resurrected through this technology. Boisselier now considers this "intelligent design" the most rational explanation of our human origins.

"Now if you consider that theory, that there are intelligent beings who created us, it means that they used their science to give us life," Boisselier says, "so that's why science is so important."

So in 1997, after receiving a master's degree in biological chemistry from the University of Dijon in France, a doctorate in physical chemistry from the same university, and a doctorate in analytical chemistry from the University of Houston, the native Frenchwoman told the Paris daily Le Monde that cloning humans was OK.

"I think people are still with the image of Hollywood with fading copies or armies of clones-that's what they have in mind," she says. "Once people realize that we're talking about having a baby, I think they will realize that they shouldn't fear that."

Perhaps. But in 1997, most Parisians did not share her view. Within four weeks of the article, she says, she was fired from her job at the French chemical giant Air Liquide, where she had worked for 12 years.

Air Liquide spokeswoman Joelle Ambon says Boisselier was asked to leave her post as a sales manager in the Lyon region of France because her private activity, a leadership position within the Raelian movement, was taking too much time away from her obligations to the company's industrial customers. "The attitude we have here is we respect the private lives of each and every member of the group provided it does not hinder their duties inside the company," Ambon says.

Boisselier sued her ex-employer for religious discrimination and eventually won compensation on appeal. But she was losing other battles. Shortly after she was fired, she lost custody of her youngest daughter, Iphigenie, to her ex-husband, Panos Cocolios.