A controversial scientist with ties to a religious cult is quitting her upstate college teaching job to concentrate on her bizarre quest to clone a human baby.
Dr. Brigitte Boisselier resigned last week as a visiting chemistry professor at Hamilton College, near Utica, "to focus full-time on her work in cloning," said school spokesman Michael Debraggio.
The mother of three is scientific director of Clonaid, a biotech firm affiliated with the Raelians, a cult that teaches that humans were cloned by extraterrestrials.
"We are committed to proceeding with the cloning and definitely think we'll have a pregnancy by the end of this year," Boisselier told The Post yesterday.
She said Clonaid will go ahead with plans to do the cloning in the United States, unless the Food and Drug Administration gets its way.
Last week Boisselier told a congressional panel that the FDA sent Clonaid a letter warning it would be violating federal regulations if it goes ahead with the controversial human-cloning experiment without the agency's approval.
And the FDA contends that, based on safety and other issues, it would not give any applications the green light at this time.
Boisselier disagrees.
"All the lawyers I have talked to say the FDA has no jurisdiction," she said.
"But whether it's here, in the U.S., or somewhere else, we will do it."
She said she hopes first to clone a child for a couple anguished at the loss of their infant.
"I'm just trying to have a baby for someone. We're not harming anyone," Boisselier said.
"Thousands of people in the last few months have been coming to us asking to be cloned. This will happen eventually," she said.
Critics of human cloning argue that it can result in myriad birth defects and as-yet unknown abnormalities.
Boisselier called those fears "sensationalized."
"They're forgetting that we have 20 years of research in human in-vitro fertilization," she said.
"We know how to detect birth defects in human beings. The defects they refer to relate to animals and they're not related to cloning, but to the embryology of these animals."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said last week that President Bush will work with Congress on a federal statute to ban cloning.
"The president believes that no research - no research - to create a human being should take place in the United States," Fleischer said.
"The president believes that any attempt to clone a human being would present a grave risk both to the mother and the child. He opposes it on moral grounds."