The Vatican, which holds that life begins at conception, has condemned cloning because extra embryos are destroyed in the process. The 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention disapproved of Boisselier's announcement.

"There is a global race going on by rogue scientists who are operating outside the mainstream," said Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptists' public policy arm. "If you allow cloning at all, some people will try to reproduce them with predictably horrific results."

Scientists said they looked forward to the promised proof.

"We'll wait and see, I guess. I'm still a skeptic and I'm hoping that it's not true," said University of Georgia cloning expert Steve Stice.

Mark Westhusin of Texas A&M University, who made headlines in February by cloning a cat, said if Boisselier's announcement is true, "they are taking a big risk in terms of health hazards to the child."

The American Society of Reproductive Medicine said in a statement: "Based on the current state of knowledge, we do not believe taking a clonal pregnancy to term would be possible in humans."

In Rome, fertility doctor Severino Antinori, who announced weeks ago that a cloned baby would be born in January through a separate effort, dismissed Clonaid's claims and said the company has no scientific credibility.

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EDITORS: Associated Press writer John Pain contributed to this reportPhotosynthesis Analysis Shows Work of Ancient Genetic Engineering
Nov. 25, 2002

The development of the biochemical process of photosynthesis is one of nature's most important events, but how did it actually happen? This is a question that molecular biology has first posed, and now perhaps answered.

"The process of photosynthesis is a very complex set of interdependent metabolic pathways," said Robert Blankenship, professor of biochemistry at Arizona State University. "How it could have evolved is a bit mysterious."

Photosynthesis is one of the most important chemical processes ever developed by life -- a chemical process that transforms sunlight into chemical energy, ultimately powering virtually all the living things and allowing them to dominate the earth. The evolution of aerobic photosynthesis in bacteria is also the most likely reason for the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere that transformed the chemistry of the Earth billions of years ago, further triggering the evolution of complex life.

After decades of research, biochemists now understand that this critical biological process depends on some very elaborate and rapid chemistry involving a series of enormously large and complex molecules - a set of complex molecular systems all working together.

"We know that the process evolved in bacteria, probably before 2.5 billion years ago , but the history of photosynthesis's development is very hard to trace," said Blankenship. "There's a bewildering diversity of photosynthetic microorganisms out there that use clearly related, but somewhat different processes. They have some common threads tying them together, but it has never been clear how they relate to each other and how the process of photosynthesis started, how it developed, and how we actually wind up with two photosystems working together in more complex photosynthetic organisms."

In a paper forthcoming in the November 22 issue of the journal Science, Blankenship and colleagues partially unravel this mystery through an analysis of the genomes of five bacteria representing the basic groups of photosynthetic bacteria and the complete range of known photosynthetic processes. The paper is co-authored by ASU doctoral student Jason Raymond, Olga Zhazybayeva and J. Peter Gogarten of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and Sveta Y. Gerdes of Integrated Genomics in Chicago, Illinois.