The controversial Raelian sect has announced the birth of the world's second cloned baby but the scientific community are sceptical and are calling for the aetheist cult to prove their claim.
Raelian sect member Ms Brigitte Boisselier, who heads the Clonaid firm that claims to have produced the first human clone, said the second baby was born in northern Europe late Friday to a lesbian couple from the Netherlands.
"It is a little girl. She is very well," Ms Boisselier said.
In The Hague, the president of the Dutch chapter of the Raelians, Mr Bart Overvliet, confirmed the birth but would not say whether or not the baby was born in the Netherlands. "I cannot confirm that the birth took place in the Netherlands. It may have happened in a foreign hospital," he said.
Cloning is banned in the Netherlands under a law that went into effect on September 1st, with violators facing up to one year in prison.
A spokesman for the Dutch justice ministry said officials were waiting for proof of the reported birth before taking action, although the health ministry said if a clone was found to have been born in the country, the authorities would "intervene".
"We are waiting to find out if the assertions are true before reacting," a spokesman for the justice ministry said in The Hague.
Meanwhile, the US journalist enlisted by Clonaid to authenticate its claims of having created the world's first cloned baby, reportedly tried to sell the story for thousands of dollars to various US broadcasters months before the event, according to a US newspaper.
The New York Timesreports today that journalist Michael Guillen, a former science editor at ABC television, had approached several broadcasters months before the cloning announcement to offer exclusive coverage of the event, throwing into question his independence from Clonaid and the Raelians.
Mr Guillen's independence has been questioned since it became known that he was seeking to sell a documentary on the cloning effort for more than $100,000 dollars, according to the paper.
DNA samples were to have been taken by an independent expert from baby Eve, and her mother, and Mr Guillen was to have supervised the work.
But Raelian sect founder Mr Claude Vorilhon had the DNA testing stopped after a Florida court summmoned him to a hearing to decide whether to place the purportedly cloned infant under court protection.
"If there is any risk that this baby is taken away from the family, it is better to lose your credibility and not do the testing," Mr Vorilhon said.
The delays in providing proof of the cloning claims have increased scepticism in the scientific community.
The credibility of the claims is also undermined by the Raelians belief that humans were cloned from aliens who landed on Earth 25,000 years ago.
"There is no reason to believe this is anything other than a long drawn-out publicity stunt," he told said. Clonaid's claims have sparked widespread scepticism among mainstream scientific experts and the company has yet to provide DNA samples or other evidence to support its assertions.
Mr Severino Antinori, a controversial Italian fertility doctor involved in separate human cloning projects, said he thought the report of the second clone's birth was as fake as the first.
"This news makes me laugh. It's a mystery to me how anybody could believe these people who have no scientific track record. It is an absolute lie," he said.
AFP &