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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.

"Losing my job and the custody of my child, I think it was too much," says Boisselier, who retreated to Montreal with her son, Thomas, to be near some of her Raelian friends. An hour outside the city, a big white barn emblazoned with the word "UFOLand" serves as the Raelian home base.

"It was something of a relief to be in such a surrounding in Montreal, compared to what I had been through in France," she says. Her eldest daughter, Marina, was already a college student in Montreal, and Boisselier was able to devote more of her time to pursuing funding for the Raelian's Clonaid start-up, then based in the Bahamas.

But her passion for teaching soon flared, and she signed on to a one-year stint at SUNY Plattsburgh in 1999 before signing a three- year contract in June to teach at Hamilton.

"We brought her here because she has incredible expertise in chemistry of small inorganic molecules," says Timothy Elgren, who helped select Boisselier as his temporary replacement while he assumed the academic responsibilities of associate dean of the faculty. "We desperately wanted her to bring that expertise to our campus, which we don't have. We very much want to benefit from that expertise."

The college won't be able to benefit much longer, as Boisselier announced she's resigning at the end of the school year in mid-May to concentrate on the Clonaid project.

Boisselier says she has been well-treated by the college.

"It was, how should I say it, respect and freedom of speech in action, because I was denied that in France." As for the other faculty members, she says, "some of them are strongly, strongly opposed to cloning and they told me so, but in a very respectful manner."

Jinnie Garrett definitely belongs to that group. "It's certainly gotten a lot more interest in scientific issues than we normally see, so in that sense it's been good," says the biology professor. But she is ready with a multilayered list of reasons to oppose cloning, including issues pertaining to safety, the psychological well-being of both the surrogate mother and the clone, the temptation to "go back and tinker" genetically, and the control of cloning technology in the hands of the wealthy.

Hamilton spokesman Debraggio says he would much rather talk about well-known college alumni, such as William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers, who in 1887 founded the Bristol-Myers pharmaceutical company where a CVS pharmacy now stands in downtown Clinton. And Debraggio readily provides the names of other famous graduates, such as sex therapy pioneer William Masters, celebrated psychologist B.F. Skinner, and Henry Allen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from the Washington Post who just left the campus after a two-day visit.

But the college hasn't shied away from the cloning controversy.

"We want people to know that she's not teaching cloning here and secondly, the research isn't being conducted here," Debraggio says. He has reminded a few concerned callers of those facts, but more often, he has had to explain why the college hasn't taken an official stand.

"The college's position is that we really shouldn't be telling people what to think," he says. Hamilton even hosted a debate in its Events Barn that attracted between 300 and 400 people and featured Boisselier, Garrett and two other professors.

"That's what a college is supposed to be about," Debraggio says. "Let the students form their own opinions."

Most of them already have, according to two Hamilton undergraduates.

"I'm totally against cloning humans," says Elise Gates, 20, a pre- med major. "I just don't think the world is ready for it at all." But Gates, who is studying for an upcoming test in Boisselier's biological chemistry course, says she's been able to separate her moral opposition to cloning from her view of Boisselier as a professor.

"I like her. She's a new teacher so she's not used to dealing with students and stuff, but she's really personable," Gates says. "She's very professional. She really cares about what the students think and how we're doing in her class."

Every Wednesday, Boisselier hosts Gates and seven other chemistry students in the Backus House faculty dining room before they head to the weekly laboratory course. Sometimes they talk about chemistry. Sometimes they talk about cloning. "Sometimes, we talk about where in the world she's been that week," Gates says.

Heather VanGuilder, a neurobiology major at Hamilton, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to present a poster at the annual "Undergraduate Research Posters on the Hill" event sponsored by The Council on Undergraduate Research. The event just happened to coincide with last month's hearing on human cloning held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subpanel on oversight and investigations. The timing allowed VanGuilder, 21, to attend a panel at which Boisselier defended Clonaid's human cloning plans.

"I thought it was absolutely amazing," VanGuilder says, adding that the experience has made her a bit more open-minded. But she's not ready to endorse human cloning just yet.

"I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the idea," VanGuilder says dryly. "Personally, I don't think we're smart enough to play God and that's the problem."

Although many cloning opponents have used similar arguments, Boisselier says the bulk of complainants now invoke the spectre of grotesque birth defects or cite their fears for the baby's safety, "which I think is another way to disguise the disgust that they have built in their minds."

The litany of potential birth defects recited by cloning opponents has certainly enhanced the "yuck factor." Jaenisch enumerates some of the many abnormalities seen in clones of mice, sheep, cows, pigs, and goats produced to date: grossly overweight newborns, enlarged placentas and navels, lung defects, heart abnormalities and other circulatory system problems, and immune system deficiencies, among others.

"In principle, anything could be wrong with them," he says. "It's just truly an unpredictable phenotype."

Although scientists don't fully understand why defects commonly result from the cloning process, many believe the abnormalities arise from the error-prone process in which the adult genome rapidly resets to its embryonic form.

Boisselier says her scientific team of a geneticist, two biologists, and an in vitro fertilization specialist are working at an undisclosed location in the United States to perfect the cloning steps.

"I am not here telling you I'm an expert in cloning," she says. "But I know how to find the right scientists for this project." And she argues that she's not about to rush into anything without addressing safety concerns.

"I'm as concerned as anybody about the health of this baby, and even more concerned," she says, knowing full well the stigma of being attached to a cloning disaster. "I know that if...the first clone baby has any defects, I will not be able to return to a project like that, and somebody won't be able to touch that for 20 years."

Which is perhaps the real reason why any carefully monitored pregnancy will be aborted at the first sign of trouble, even if the defect isn't life-threatening.

"If we observe any defects like one of the arms is missing, then we will abort, even if-someone could live with one arm, but the baby had two arms," she says of the 10-month-old who died. "What I am saying is that this baby was perfectly healthy except for his heart, and so we will reproduce that baby."

Well, not exactly, but close enough that the "random birth defect" which led to the botched heart operation may be back the second time around.

"But the parents will accept that," she says. "They know exactly what they will do if the baby is born with the defect, and what to avoid."

Many other potential parents have lined up to accept the uncertain outcome of cloning. Boisselier says her company has received inquiries from infertile couples, parents grieving the loss of a child, gays and lesbians, and older single men and women who reason that raising a "belated twin" would be easier than trying to find a partner and conceiving a child in the traditional way. And Clonaid has had no trouble lining up surrogate mothers, including Boisselier's 22-year-old daughter, Marina Cocolios, who is an art student at Montreal's Concordia University. Boisselier, in her mid- 40s, jokes that she feels too young to be a grandmother. But she exudes motherly pride as she recalls her surprise at Marina's decision, reached soon after an e-mail request was sent to all Raelians seeking volunteers.

"She said, 'I may be able to help you out.'" After all, Raelians are forbidden to ingest drugs of any kind, including caffeine, with the exception of a glass of wine now and then. A drug-free, healthy 22-year-old would make an ideal surrogate mother.

Marina says she's always wanted a child of her own, but as an art student, she simply doesn't have the time or money.

"I met the parents and they loved that child so much," she says of the dead baby. "I know he will be loved. Giving the chance for that child's DNA to be expressed is so beautiful.

"It's like having a pregnancy for me and for the whole of humanity. I think that's really beautiful."

Clonaid isn't alone in its excitement. Former University of Kentucky reproductive specialist Dr. Panos Zavos has announced his intention to clone a human in an undisclosed Mediterranean country along with Italian fertility specialist Dr. Severino Antinori.

The doctors say they've already attracted hundreds of couples. At last month's congressional hearings to consider an outright ban on human cloning in the absence of clear authority by the Food and Drug Administration, Zavos and Boisselier met for the first time but spoke little. Boisselier assumes the silence was due to his discomfort with her religious beliefs. Or maybe it was the threat of competition.

"And I wish him well," Boisselier says, "because if he does succeed before I do, in a certain sense I win." After all, few scientists were speaking openly about the prospects of human cloning four years ago. Now, most of them consider it as inevitable as next winter's snow returning to blanket the historic brick buildings and handsome wood houses of Hamilton College.