October 20, 2003

American Scientist Linked to Plot to Clone Chairman Mao

CIA Interecepts of Chinese Leaders's Conversations Cited

The Justice Department is studying whether an obscure provision in the Patriot Act banning cloning can be used to prosecute the American scientist who worked with Chinese researchers to achieve the first human pregnancy using DNA-swapping technology. Similar technology led to the historic cloning of Dolly the Sheep.

Sources at the Justice Department say intelligence intercepts of cell phone conversations between Chinese leaders suggest the real goal of the fertility research is to clone Mao Tse Tung. Chairman Mao, who founded China's communist government at the end of World War II, died in 1976.

The Patriot Act provision, widely overlooked in the rush to enact anti-terrorism legislation after the World Trade Center attacks, prohibits cloning any "despot, dictator, tyrant or opponent of liberty."

"Cloning Chairman Mao certainly sounds illegal, but there are even scarier possibilities," said a senior member of the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's civilian advisory group.

"All you need is a lock of hair from Mussolini or for somebody to dig up Napoleon's bones for his DNA and you could have a real geopolitical problem on your hands" said the board member, who declined to be identified. "Or Stalin. Imagine Mussolini, Napoleon and Stalin snarling over something like European Union tariffs. I don't see how any true American defender of liberty could be a party to cloning such people."

Spokespersons for both the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency declined to confirm the investigation into the activities of the New York University researcher as they relate to the Patriot Act or the intercepted telephone conversations between Chinese government leaders.

Dr. James A. Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endrocrinology at New York University, said he collaborated with the Chinese scientists at Sun Yat-Sen Medical University to avoid excessive regulation of human reproductivity research in the United States.

Opponents of the cloning of humans have denounced the research. The Bush Administration opposes cloning of humans.

Several groups opposed to the limitations on civil liberties contained in the Patriot Act expressed surprise that it contained anti-cloning language. "It's one of the most hastily conceived and poorly written pieces of legislation I've ever seen," said Horatio T. Folger, the executive director of the Liberty Now Foundation. "To tell you the truth, I'd missed that language until now." He confessed that each time he sits down to read the act in its entirety, "I fall asleep in an instant."

A source close to a member of the Senate Committee on Intelligence who saw a transcript of the Chinese telephone intercepts described them as "rather convincing, as these things go." He said there was no question that the intercepts were conversations between Chinese leaders at the highest levels of the government or that they discussed Chairman Mao.

"There does seem to be disagreement among CIA linguists about the use of a couple of verbs in these conversations," the Committee source said.
Which verbs are in dispute and what dialect was involved could not be learned.

James Wu, a Chinese-born linguist at the Language Coalition, a Washington think tank, speculated that the Chinese officials might not have been discussing cloning. "I haven't heard the intercepts and know nothing about the skills of the CIA linguists," he said. "But it's possible given the range of verbs that might have been used that they were actually telling sexually oriented ribald jokes."

Wu said the context in which the conversations occurred would be crucial. "Were they laughing, or not?" he asked.

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