WATCH: Cloned in the USA

Twenty-five years ago today the media tour I was on after finding the lab in rural West Virginia ended abruptly, writes Joe Lauria. Watch the replay!

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

In the summer of 2001 I received a call from Lois Rogers, the then science editor of The Sunday Times of London. A woman named Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop in the Church of Rael, had testified to a U.S. congressional committee that her movement was in the midst of cloning a human being.

She said they were reproducing the dead infant of a U.S. local politician and that the lab was somewhere inside the United States, but she wouldn’t tell the lawmakers where.

Find the lab, was my assignment from The Sunday Times.

I was flown out to Las Vegas to do a long, pool-side interview with Boisselier, a French biochemist who had joined the Raelan cult in 1992. Rael was the pseudonym of Claude Vorilhon, a French race-car driver who claimed to have been abducted by aliens who informed him that the human race had been cloned from this outer space race.

Boisselier let a few more clues drop, but it was when I did extensive Lexis-Nexis searches through the vast database of U.S. media for politicians who had lost an infant son that I hit upon the story of Mark Hunt. He had been a member of the West Virginia House for five years. His 10-month old baby had died after heart surgery in September 1999.

Believing this could be the politician Boisselier had testified about, I began zeroing in on West Virginia. The company doing the Raelan’s work was named Bioserv, Inc., Boisselier had said.

In those days White Pages online phone directories were free and very efficient.

I looked up the company in West Virginia.

And there it was. In black and white. In the telephone book.

The Sunday Times sent me to West Virginia.

Through the phone listing I traced the address to an old high school building in Nitro, West Virginia, a town named after the chemical weapons that were made there during World War I. (A famous plant worker there was named one Clark Gable.)

I contacted the building’s manager, a man named Greg Casto. When I told him what I was after, a worried look came over his face. He took me immediately to Room 201 on the second floor.

And there through a small window in the door, through glass with chicken wire in it, was a room with lab equipment.  On the wall were posters of human cells.

“I knew something weird was going on in there,” Casto said. “I knew it.”

Casto told me Hunt had been paying rent for the lab room. It turned out that after his son Andrew had died, Hunt froze some of his cells. Unable to cope with their grief, he and his wife searched for a way to bring him back to life.

Hunt says he travelled widely meetings scientists. He finally encountered on the Internet the one he was convinced would help him. He made a deal with Boisselier, investing $500,000 to set up the secret company Bioserv Inc., located behind those locked doors.

Casto didn’t have the key to the room. The photographer The Sunday Times had hired to accompany me snapped several shots through the chicken-wire window.

Then Casto asked me, “Do you think someone will try to blow the place up?”

“What?” I asked.

“You know, the way they blow up abortion clinics,” he said, an unseemly practice that took place in several clinics around the U.S.

“Look,” I replied, “The only thing I think will happen is that this place will be invaded by television trucks once I break the story.”

“Will you come downstairs and tell the police about this?” Casto asked. The entire town’s police force was located on the ground floor of the building.

My immediate instinct was no way. I don’t want anyone else knowing about this before the story came out and why get the authorities involved? It had nothing to do with them. If they wanted to take action after my report, that was their business. But not now. I don’t work for the police.

But Casto, who had been extremely helpful, kept pleading with me, so I gave in.

We went downstairs and I repeated to the cops what I had told Casto: there was nothing to fear except CNN bearing down on them.

I contacted Lois, the science editor, to inform her I’d found the lab. She was overjoyed. But she was also on holiday in the south of France. She was miles from the newsroom in Wapping to plead her case that the story should run.

And in fact the editors told her they were going with another cloning story, an interview they had gotten with an Italian doctor who claimed he was cloning a human being too.

Lois was furious. But the story was spiked. At least for now.

The next morning I left town for Charleston, the state capital, to try to get a statement from Hunt. He didn’t answer the phone. And he wasn’t home. So I left a note stuffed into the front door of his house to contact me. He never did.

I then picked up the local paper, The Charleston Gazette. I read that a British reporter (sic) had alarmed the entire town of Nitro, West Virginia, by telling police they could be in danger because the human cloning lab he had found in the old high school could very well be bombed by extremists the way abortion clinics had been.

It was the exact, 180-degree opposite of what I had told the police.

I phoned the reporter on the story. I told him he broke one of the cardinal rules of journalism. When you write something about someone, especially if it is negative, you have to try to get their side of the story before publishing. He never did.

I chewed him out for about half an hour before talking to his stern editor who refused to publish a retraction, even though I had two witnesses – the photographer and Casto – who had very clearly heard what I told the police and were willing to say so.

I later learned that the story was based on the police report given to the newspaper. I went to a libel lawyer back in Manhattan to ask about suing the paper for defamation. “Forget about it,” he said. “It’s in the police report.”

“So what?” I said. “These are country-bumpkin cops who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of.”

You’ll never win, he said. It was another lesson in an authoritarian society. What the cops say, goes, despite my witnesses willing to testify.

Back home in New York with The Sunday Times having not run my story on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2001, I logged on to the Drudge Report. I saw his spinning police light indicating he was breaking a major story.

“Human Cloning Lab Found” screamed the headline.

What?

I proceeded to read the article that I had written for the Sunday Times that the paper hadn’t used. Except it was credited to The Times of London. Though they are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, the papers have totally separate editorial staffs and even compete with each other.

I wrote to Drudge. He called me. “How did you get my story?” I asked him. He wouldn’t say. He then paid me $1,000 for the piece.

Drudge had made his name by publishing Newsweek’s spiked story about Monica Lewinsky’s dress that someone had leaked to him.

Then he said: “You are going to start getting phone calls from TV producers in 20 minutes. They use my site as their Bible to know what stories to cover and what guests to invite.”

Of course I thought he was exaggerating.

He was. It was 40 minutes later when the first of them called, a producer from ABC’s Good Morning America. Would I come on to discuss finding the cloning lab?

At that time I lived on W. 75^th Street and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. ABC’s studios were 11 blocks away on 66^th Street and Columbus Avenue. They sent a limousine anyway.

As I was about to go on they seated me off to the left of the main set. Then the host, George Stephanopoulos, who had been communications director in the Clinton White House, came over to sit across from me. He looked me in the eye and said, “Is it true?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay.” And he proceeded with the interview.

ABC’s website wrote:

“Researching old news archives, Lauria told ABCNEWS’ Good Morning America today that he discovered a former West Virginia state legislator and congressional candidate had lost his infant son in circumstances similar to Boisselier’s undisclosed letter writer. That 1999 news article in a Charleston, W.Va., paper identified the local legislator as Mark Hunt.

Lauria further discovered in a Charleston phone directory a listing for Bioserv, Inc.—a company Boisselier claimed to have started with the letter writer. A call to the company was answered by a building manger who confirmed that Mark Hunt paid the rent on the building.

‘It was spooky,’ says Lauria about discovering the connection and the lab’s location. “I realized I was the only person in Charleston, West Virginia — other than Mr. Hunt and his law partner — who knew what was going on.’”

In exchange for keeping the project secret, federal authorities had already shut down the lab by the time I exposed it and Hunt then dumped Boisselier for being a publicity hound.

The day after Good Morning America, a CNN producer for Wolf Blitzer called. I went to a studio hookup in New York while Blitzer was in Washington.

And then came a call from Greta Van Sustren’s producer, who booked me. On the day I was to appear she called back to ask if I would mind moving it to Thursday because there had been a big development in another story they were following.

I said yes. That day was Sept. 10, 2001.

***

Last year I got a call from a reporter working on a radio documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) about human cloning. One of the episodes will be about the Nitro lab. I agreed to meet with him and a colleague in Nitro, 24 years later. We met with the town’s mayor who opened the doors of the old high school for us.

The building is totally destroyed inside, with plaster, glass and wood strewn on the floor. It is slated for demolition. It is also dangerous because it is full of asbestos that had not yet been removed.

But the mayor unlocked the chain anyway and we walked over the debris, up the stairs to the second floor to Room 201. And there it was.

It brought back plenty of memories that are encapsulated in that article I wrote for The Sunday Times that Matt Drudge published instead 25 years ago:

Cloned in the USA: Attempt to Clone Human Being inSecret West Virginia Lab Revealed

By Joe Lauria

(“London Times,” August 12, 2001)

It was a perfect place to hide their scheme: an old classroom in a squalid former high school tucked away in the hills of rural West Virginia.

The town of Nitro’s police station is in the rundown 1950s-era building whose brown bricks are blackened with soot. Bingo games are played in another room.

On the second floor is a day-care centre and plumbing and roofing companies. But down a dark corridor lined with trash and broken students’ lockers is Room 201.

Inside is a pristine laboratory,fitted with sophisticated equipment. Green posters of human cells adorn the walls. A blue incubator stands in the back. It looks like an ordinary lab.

But in this room, scientists working for a UFO cult and a local politician were secretly trying to clone a human being. They were attempting to bring back to life Andrew, a 10-month old baby boy who died after heart surgery in September 1999.

He was the son of Mark and Tracy Hunt, a wealthy and well-connected political family in Charleston.

Mark Hunt, 41, had been a member of the West Virginia House for five years and declared himself a candidate in the November 2000 election for the U.S. House of Representatives.

He dropped out of that race, after spending $200,000 of his own money, and ran instead for the West Virginia State Senate. He lost. Hunt is now practicing law, but maintains a Hunt for Congress office in Charleston.

After Andrew died, his parents froze some of his cells. Unable to cope with their grief, the Hunts began searching for a way to bring him back to life.

Hunt says he travelled widely meeting scientists. He finally encountered on the Internet the one he was convinced would help him. He made a deal with French biochemist Brigitte Boisselier.

With doctorates from France and Texas, Boisselier, 44, was teaching at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse. In 1993, she joined the Quebec-based Raelian cult.

Today, she is a bishop in the cult, which believes the human race originated as clones of an advanced alien species. Its leader, French racing car driver and journalist Claude Vorilhon, who calls himself Rael, claims he learned this when he boarded a UFO in France in 1973.

Rael has set up headquarters at a science fiction theme park called UFO Land outside Montreal.

The Raelian movement says it has 50,000 members worldwide, who, according to its Web site, must pay 13 per cent of their yearly income to the cult and take part in unusual sexual practices – such as being made to mate with someone of the same sex to prove one’s sexual orientation.

Boisselier became science director of Rael’s company, Clonaid, whose aim is to charge $200,000 to clone any person who can pay. She claims hundreds of infertile couples, homosexuals and others have asked her to clone them.

Around August 2000, nearly a year after Andrew’s death, Boisselier and Hunt went into a cloning business of their own.

Hunt says he invested $500,000 to set up a secret, new company called Bioserv Inc., which they did not register with the West Virginia authorities. Hunt chose Nitro, an obscure town named after nitroglycerin [Correction: after nitro-cellulose] since it was founded during the First World War to make explosives.

Hunt rented the old classroom for $320 a month and began filling it with the equipment needed to create a new Andrew.

Boisselier hired three scientists, all American-trained — a geneticist, a biochemist and an ob-gyn affiliated with an in-vitro fertilization clinic — to carry out the work.

Their method was similar to Dr. Ian Wilmut’s, the creator of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first clone in 1996. A human egg’s genetic information is stripped away and the nucleus from a cell of the person to be cloned, in this case baby Andrew, would be fused by electricity into the empty egg. The embryo is then implanted in a surrogate mother.

Boisselier says 50 women came forward to bear the Andrew clone, including her own 22-year-old daughter, Marina Cocolios.

All the women may have been needed since there were more than 200 attempts to bring Dolly to term, all but one of the embryos miscarrying or born horribly deformed — a principal argument of opponents of human cloning. But Boisselier said technology would allow her scientists to detect abnormalities in time to abort a fetus gone wrong.

Boisselier could not contain herself. She began to give numerous media interviews, saying a cloned child would be born by the end of 2001. And she began dropping hints.

Last March [2001], she was called to testify before a U.S. House subcommittee, which was gathering evidence for a bill that would outlaw human cloning. Before Congress, she released an anonymous letter she said was from the father who had lost a 10-month old son and wanted him cloned.

“I am a successful attorney, a former State Legislator, a current elected official, a husband, a son, a brother, but most importantly, I am a father,” Hunt wrote.

“We didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t accept that it was over for our child, and for the first time in human history I/we didn’t accept death as the end. Not since our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, spoke to Lazarus and told him to ‘come forth’ from the grave has a human being able to bridge the great gulf of death.

I hoped and prayed that my son would be the first; I decided then and there that I would never give up on my child. I would never stop until I could give his DNA — his genetic makeup a chance. I knew that we only had one chance; human cloning. To create a healthy duplicate, a twin of our son. I set out to make it happen.”

With no law against human cloning, the Food and Drug Administration took notice. Agents visited Boisselier at Hamilton College. They then arranged a visit to the lab at Nitro and struck a deal with her and Hunt last spring.

They would not reveal the name of the father or the lab’s location in return for their agreement to cease work on the experiment. Boisselier and Hunt agreed until the legal picture was clear.

But Boisselier gave media interviews again, saying she would not stop the work. That is when Hunt said he began to sour on her, calling her a “press hog” who was getting him in trouble with the FDA. He says he changed the lock on the lab door to prevent further experiments.

A federal grand jury was then convened in Syracuse to gather evidence toward a possible indictment against Boisselier on the grounds her cloning activities had violated U.S. drug laws,which the FDA oversees, a U.S. government source said.

An FDA spokeswoman refused to discuss the case.

Boisselier said in Las Vegas, where she lives, that she wants to sue the FDA to challenge its authority to ban human cloning.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban all human cloning. President George W.Bush said he would sign the legislation if the Senate passes a similar measure.

Boisselier said she doesn’t intend to break the law and will move the project abroad if necessary. She said her company, Clonaid, has a lab outside the U.S., but refused to say where. A

Web site edited by Boisselier said in March 1999 that Clonaid opened an office in South Korea and was seeking a partnership with scientists there. It has a second Web site registered in Seoul.

As Hunt’s name and the lab’s location were revealed, he admitted his role in the cloning attempt. He said he was severing ties with Boisselier and would abandon the project to bring back Andrew, adding that the work had only got as far as testing the viability of the child’s DNA.

Boisselier said in a news release she had 2,000 people waiting to take Hunt’s place and would open a new lab elsewhere in the U.S.

Hunt says he hasn’t given up his belief in raising the dead through cloning.

The Drudge Report archives do not go back far enough to contain this story, which was reproduced from Drudge by World-Wide Religious News (WWRN).

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

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