io9
In 1978, David Rorvik, medical reporter for the New York Times and Time Magazine, wrote a book called In His Image: The Cloning of Man. In it, he claimed that a real human clone had just been born. Everyone believed him because he was — at least until then — a credible reporter, and his book was published by a well-known publishing house in the medical field. Everyone, that is, except for the rest of the science community.
Rorvik told the fascinating story of how an anonymous billionaire had approached him with the desire to make a clone of himself. With all his connections in the medical world, he was able to gather up a team of scientists who could do this. The team, code named Darwin, flew to a secret island in the Pacific and holed up for five years until it successfully created a human egg with the billionaire's DNA. They then injected the egg into the uterus of a woman with code name Sparrow. Nine months later, a baby was born. Or so the story went.
The March 3, 1978 edition of the New York Post bore a glaring headline declaring the birth of the first human clone. But scientists didn't buy it — they read the book and felt it was full of shit. Rorvik had based his cloning technology on one that was only known to work with frogs — there was no way that this could have been used to clone a human. Then an Oxford geneticist cited in the book sued Rorvik for making false claims and won, and the courts ruled that Rorvik's book was "a fraud and a hoax."
To this day, we don't really know why Rorvik wrote the book. Rorvik continues to claim that his book is telling the truth, and some believe him. And by the way, he's still writing medical books.
What do you think? Is the man a total liar or just slightly ahead of his time? The Cloning of Man [Museum of Hoaxes]
Comments
Then it became a movie: PARTS- A CLONUS HORROR
@Plague:
Don't you mean "The Island"? ;)
If only there were some way to confirm that a living, breathing 20 year old person existed.
But was Rorvik able to clone his awesome '70s 'stache?
@willywag: No, that movie was the clone. Cloning a movie about cloning, how meta.
omg it's me, i was born in 1978!
I think the 'clone' was Louise Brown, the first test tube baby. She was born July 25, 1978. I don't believe she was a clone, but the technology to 'make' a child seemed scary and sci-fi back then. Right wing nutters screamed that 'making' children was unnatural and grotesque. That children produced from in-vitro fertilization weren't 'real' people and had no souls...which is ironic, since nowadays they're screaming destroying embyros (created with the same technology) is the same as killing a baby and the same as murder. *sigh*
Early to mid 60's.
@92BuickLeSabre: You mean 30 year old.
@Trae: That's probably what makes him so hard to find!
I love these sorts of stories. The truth of them doesn't even matter all that much, because even as total frauds they're interesting character studies of the confolk involved. They point to some basic mystery. But I also love listening to Coast to Coast, so.
@Plague: if that clone ended up with the body of a pro golfer and wore too-tight Munsingwear t-shirts, i pity him.
The island being Cuba and Castro the clone. Now it all makes sense, ah?
well considering that we now have cloned beef approved by the us food and drug admin the time line would make sense. I mean think this one through look how long it takes a drug to be approved and now we are cloning cattle for food? Now reverse engineer the timeline about 30 years or so.....
@92BuickLeSabre: Mathematics aside, that was ffing funny...seriously, I mean The Onion funny. Good on you, great Buick.
I hadn't heard of Rorvik's book until this entry appeared, and it took a few weeks for interlibrary loan to get the now out-of-print volume in my hands. I finished reading it last night.
Part of the problem with Lisa Katayama's post is that it's clear she hasn't read the book. The clone was allegedly born in 1976, Rorvik approached the book's publisher in 1977 and the work was subsequently published in 1978. These aren't difficult dates to track, since the book makes mention of all of them and isn't so long that one might forget.
It is also untrue that scientists thought "the book was full of shit." Some decried the techniques described, but it's worthwhile to point out that the so-called African frog method of cloning was not the one ultimately used. Again, reading the book helps. In fact, those parts of the cloning process set out in the book are very similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep and a number of scientific contemporaries in 1978 admitted that what Rorvik claimed was possible.
As In His Image points out, the technology existed even in the mid-'70s to achieve human cloning. What lacked was the will. And given that IVF was decried at the time as being unnatural, one can imagine the horror that greeted the very idea of cloning.
While In His Image is the very model of circumstantial evidence, it is compelling circumstantial evidence indeed. And assuming the child survived any accidents or illnesses that might have befallen him, there is as of this writing a 32-year-old human clone walking the Earth.
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