The soot that had accumulated on the brown brickwork of the dilapidated building that houses the Nitro, West Virginia town police station dates back to the 1950s.
In a separate area, bingo games were being played.
A daycare center, plumbing and roofing businesses were located on the second story of the building.
But Room 201 was different. It was situated at the end of a dim hallway that was littered with debris and damaged student lockers. On the inside was a spotless laboratory that had been outfitted with cutting-edge scientific equipment. The walls were covered with green posters depicting human cells. At the far back there was a baby blue incubator. It looked like a regular laboratory.
Scientists working for a UFO cult and a local politician were covertly attempting to clone a human being in this room. They were hoping to resurrect Andrew, a 10-month-old infant boy who died in September 1999 after undergoing cardiac surgery. He was the son of Mark and Tracy Hunt, an affluent and politically connected Charleston family.
Mark Hunt, 41, had been a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates for five years when he filed his candidacy for the United States House of Representatives in November 2000. After spending $200,000 of his own money, he withdrew out of that contest and ran for the West Virginia State Senate instead. He was defeated. Hunt is presently a partner in Mark A. Hunt & Associates.
Andrew’s parents froze some of his cells after he died. Unable to reconcile with their bereavement, the Hunts started looking for a mechanism to resurrect him. Hunt claims to have traveled extensively to visit scientists. He eventually found the one he was confident would assist him on the Internet. He then struck a collaboration with Brigitte Boisselier, a French biochemist.
Boisselier, 44, was a professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, near Syracuse, with doctorates from France and Texas. She joined the Quebec-based Raelian cult in 1993.
Raelians believe that cloning is the key to immortality.
Boisselier is now a bishop in the cult that thinks the human race evolved from clones of a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization. Its leader, Claude Vorilhon, a French racing car driver and writer who goes by the name Rael, claims to have discovered this when he boarded a UFO in France in 1973.
Rael has established his headquarters in UFO Land, a science fiction theme park located just outside of Montreal, Canada.
According to the Raelian movement’s website, it boasts 50,000 members worldwide who must pay the cult 13% of their monthly salary and participate in odd sexual activities such as being forced to mate with someone of the same sex to verify one’s sexual orientation.
Boisselier was appointed scientific director of Rael’s firm, Clonaid, whose goal is to charge $200,000 to clone anybody willing to pay. Hundreds of infertile couples, gays, and others, she says, have requested her to clone them.
Around August 2000, about a year after Andrew’s death, Boisselier and Hunt started their own cloning company.
Hunt claims he financed $500,000 in a covert new firm named Bioserv Inc., which they failed to register with West Virginia authorities.
Hunt picked Nitro, an insignificant run down town named after nitroglycerine since it was built during WWII to manufacture explosives.
Nitro is centrally situated amongst several chemical plants on the Kanawha River, and famous for the landmark suit over pollutant dioxin from the former Monsanto chemical plant.
Hunt leased the old classroom for $320 each month and started stocking it with the necessary equipment to construct a brand-new Andrew. Boisselier engaged three American-trained experts to carry out the work: a geneticist, a biochemist, and an ob-gyn linked with an in-vitro fertilization facility.
Their methodology was identical to that of Dr. Ian Wilmut, who created Dolly the sheep in 1996, the world’s first clone. The genetic information from a human egg is removed, and the nucleus from a cell of the individual to be cloned, in this instance infant Andrew, is fused by electricity into the empty egg. After that, the embryo is placed in a surrogate mother.
According to Boisselier, 50 women volunteered to carry the Andrew clone, including her own 22-year-old daughter, Marina Cocolios.
All of the women may have been necessary since there were almost 200 attempts to bring Dolly to term, with all but one of the embryos miscarrying or being born terribly disfigured – a major justification used by opponents of human cloning. However, according to Boisselier, technology will enable her scientists to discover anomalies in time to terminate a baby gone awry.
The egocentric Boisselier couldn’t stop herself. She started giving press interviews, claiming that a cloned baby will be delivered before the end of 2001.
And she started dropping breadcrumbs.
Boisselier was called to speak before a U.S. House committee in March 2001, which was collecting information for a measure that would criminalize human cloning. She presented an anonymous letter to Congress that she said was from the father of a 10-month-old baby who 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 Savior, 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.”
The Food and Drug Administration took attention since there was no legislation prohibiting human cloning. Agents paid Boisselier a visit at Hamilton College. They then scheduled a visit to Nitro’s lab and negotiated a deal with her and Hunt last spring.
They agreed to stop working on the project in exchange for not disclosing the father’s identity or the location of the facility. Boisselier and Hunt decided to wait until the legal situation was clear.
However, Boisselier did media interviews again, stating that she would not cease working. That’s when Hunt claims he became tired of her, labeling her a “press hog” who was causing him problems with the FDA. He claims he modified the lock on the lab door to prevent additional tests.
According to a US government source, a federal grand jury was then formed in Syracuse to collect evidence for a prospective prosecution against Boisselier on the grounds that her cloning efforts breached US drug rules, which the FDA controls.
Later that year, however, President George W. Bush prohibited human cloning.
According to a website operated by Boisselier, Clonaid launched an office in South Korea in March 1999 and was looking for a relationship with experts there. It has registered a second website in Seoul.
Hunt confirmed his participation in the cloning effort once his identity and the location of the facility were disclosed. He said that he was cutting relations with Boisselier and would stop the endeavor to bring Andrew back, stating that the study had only progressed as far as verifying the viability of the child’s DNA.
In a press release, Boisselier said that she had 2,000 individuals lined up to fill Hunt’s seat and that she would create a secret new lab somewhere in the United States. According to Rael, they have already cloned a human child, though no scientific evidence has been offered.
Hunt has maintained that he has not abandoned his conviction in cloning to raise the dead.