October 23, 2000 – The leader of an obscure religious group known as the Raelians (sounds like "aliens") announced this month that his group has found a wealthy American couple willing to finance their efforts to clone a person. Rael, the group's leader, made the announcement in Montreal accompanied by his scientific adviser and five young women wearing identical necklaces, part of a bevy of 50 Raelian women who have volunteered to take a shot at bearing the world's first human clone.

Rael (formerly a French race-car driver known as Claude Vorilhon) explained that the group received $1 million to fund their "Clonaid" project from a mysteriously unnamed, but wealthy American couple who recently lost their 10-month old baby girl to a medical accident. The couple has hired Clonaid to create a genetically identical replacement of their deceased daughter from her preserved cells. The Raeliens – who believe cloning to be the key to eternal life and that humans are the result of genetic experimentation by scientifically advanced aliens – said they expect to start the fertilization process this month and produce a cloned being within the next 18 months.

According to the Clonaid web site, if the Raelians are successful in their initial attempt they will offer cloning services to "homosexuals, infertile couples, and parents who've lost a child." Considering that, for the low-low price of $200,000-per-being, you can create an exact replicate of yourself or a loved one (including pets), Clonaid may soon become the hottest, most controversial web site since Napster.

Based on "original" interpretations of the Bible, the Raelian religion claims that the word Elohim was mistranslated from Hebrew to mean "God," but is actually the name of an extraterrestrial race who cloned humans in their image, populated the planet with animals, and set the oceans in motion. Raelians also believe that the birth and resurrection of Jesus were, in fact, cloning operations performed by the Elohim, and last year they raised $7 million to create the world's first "extraterrestrial embassy."

Due to the unpredictability of current procedures (it took 277 unsuccessful attempts to create one Dolly the sheep), human reproductive cloning is an act still largely considered unethical by the scientific community. Experts agree, however, that a well-funded group of technologically backed UFO fanatics with a volunteer harem of 50 experimental wombs willing to endure numerous miscarriages for one success, has a better than average chance of pulling it off.

Elsewhere in replication news, last week the yet unborn genetic clone of a champion dairy cow (which produces enough milk annually to cure a small country of osteoporosis) sold for $82,000 in auction at the National Dairy Expo and, apparently not wanting to be outdone by the Raelians in the highly competitive field of religious zealotry, the Second Coming Project has declared their intention to clone Jesus Christ by extracting DNA from one of the ancient relics believed to contain his blood. "The zygote of Jesus Christ would then be surgically implanted into the womb of a young virginal woman who will then bring the baby Jesus to term, promptly getting the 'Second Coming' underway," claims their web site (www.clonejesus.com).

All religious fanaticism and fascistic Boys From Brazil stereotypes aside, many scientists agree that cloning has the potential to be the most significant advancement in medicine since Galen illegally performed clandestine autopsies on gladiators and determined that human bodies are governed by a complex set of organ systems, not a precarious balance of humors.

By cloning embryonic stem cells, scientists are now able to "grow" different types of tissue (including nerves, organs, muscles, and bones) which are capable of replacing damaged, degenerated, or cancerous tissues with an individual's own healthy cells. Conceivably, with the use of cellular cloning, diseases that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time could be completely eliminated, severely injured body parts could be regenerated, and the human aging process could be stabilized or even reversed.

Many experts are also advocating genetic cloning as a way to restore populations of endangered and extinct animal species. Scientists in Massachusetts are currently attempting to clone the endangered gaur in the uterus of a cow and, if that experiment is successful, they intended to revive the liquid-nitrogen frozen cells of the National Zoo's deceased giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing.

The obvious question here is ... haven't these people seen Jurassic Park!?

Extinct creatures are unfortunately extinct for a reason – they've being systematically assimilated by an army of perfectly tan healthy beautiful people who need inordinate amounts of room and resources to cruise in land roving SUVs and drink latte's from disposable cups while mentally concocting software applications capable of designing and building prefabricated ergonomically-correct dwellings out of modular colored recycled plastic. Sure, we may have the technology to resuscitate everything from panda bears to velociraptors, but until the root cause of extinction is dealt with, which is to say until humans curb their immense appetites for consumption, we bring back eradicated species at our own peril.

Given the fiber-optic speed of technological development, and humankind's innate propensity for hubris, it's only a matter of months before the reproductive cloning of Homo sapiens becomes a reality.

Of course, this raises endlessly debatable ethical questions like: Is the world ready for a million miniature Madonnas? Or, what's the best way to market "designer babies?" There are also theological questions like: If Elohim cloned humans in their own image, who cloned Elohim? But, possibly the most important question of all is: How do we know we're the product of a *successful* alien genetic experiment?

What if, on the cosmic scale of things, we're just one big mutated petri-dish that's been banished from the preferred section of the universe and sent to orbit a puny-ass star in some obscure backwater galaxy where no self-respecting alien would live?

Whatever the answers, the real-life reality of the twenty-first century is likely to make even the most bizarre episode of the "X-Files" seem like a twenty-year old re-run of "Gilligan's Island."