I imagine that, like me, you cannot have failed to be confronted with all the hullabaloo concerning clones and cloning over the past few weeks. But just in case you've been in some far-flung date-infested watering hole with no means of clicking onto your favourite news website, here's the story. Clonaid, a research company with close ties to the Raelian sect, claim that it has successfully produced the first human clone using a procedure similar to the one used to clone Dolly the sheep.

Stranger than fiction
The Raelian sect was started by a Frenchman called Claude Vorilhon. He re-named himself Rael and claims that some thirty years ago, on top of a volcano in the Auvergne region of France, he had several meetings with 'beings' from outer space. Apparently these 'green aliens with long dark hair' confessed to him that they had created the human race some 25,000 years ago. Having gone aboard the spaceship with its flashing red light, Rael was wined and dined by 'voluptuous female robots' and informed that aliens called 'Elohim' cloned themselves to create Man, or to be politically correct, men and women.
Now don't you find this story just a little far-fetched? Don't you think that there is something manifestly bizarre about a grown man admitting to being on top of a volcano all alone? Since he was a sportswriter and racing car driver prior to founding his sect, one could be permitted to assume that either he'd misplaced the racetrack, or was covering a bungee jump down into the molten lava. But that's making assumptions ,what was he really doing up there?
Another odd point in Vorilhon's story is that he claims the aliens spoke to him in French. Let's face it, why would apparently superior beings speak a language sprinkled with acute, grave and circumflex accents and such complicated verb conjugations as French? If he'd said they spoke to him in English, Russian or Chinese, okay. But French?

To clone or not to clone
Now I don't know if you are for or against cloning, but I personally feel that the whole subject of cloning humans depressing. The process of cloning is to make a genetically identical organism as oneself through non-sexual means. In other words, an organism without an orgasm! Well no thank you, Rael. I'll accept cloning plants and sheep without sex, but creating a human without humping hardly bears thinking about. It's worse than drinking tea without milk.
To clone or not to clone: that is the question. I have to admit that I'm surprised that there is such an outcry against cloning given that the watch industry has been cloning for years. Strangely enough, many of the benefits and problems facing human cloning also holds true for watches. For example, the advantages of cloning ensures that outdated models can be easily replaced, extinct models can be brought back and re-introduced into the world and most watch manufacturing countries do not have laws concerning clones.
The major disadvantage of cloning is the poor survival rate, which according to the latest statistics, is only one in five. Needless to say, watch manufacturers who clone are very anxious about these figures given that the original from which they have cloned is usually a best-seller.
Apparently the failures of the clones are all influenced by the genetic background of the original. So for all you cloning experts out there in the real world, be careful which model you decide to clone.
A final word of warning: in the dictionary, genetics is followed directly by Geneva!