Baby Eve is a horrifying yet bemusing example of how the most serious debates can be driven by forces impossible to take seriously. There is nothing more serious before mankind today than cloning; at the moment, it is in the hands of a quasi-religious sect of pseudo-futurists and the infant girl they claim to have created from her mother’s DNA.

Were the implications not so profound, the Geneva-based Raelian Movement would be gaining worldwide attention as a sideshow. The 40,000 or so members worldwide wear Flash Gordon-style spacesuits and bad haircuts. They believe humanity was created by extraterrestrials who had mastered the science of creating life from inert matter. They swallow the notion that these space aliens left explicit instructions that the sect’s young women could best serve by attending to the, ahem, non-cloning needs of its founder, Rael, a former auto-racing journalist.

Why the aliens did not also leave explicit instructions on how to create human life and instead left it for human scientists to figure out is a question being asked by everybody but the Raelians. They say Clonaid, the company they founded in 1997 after British scientists cloned a sheep, has taken human science to the next level and produced a seven-pound baby girl. Over the next several weeks, with review of their work by independent scientists, they say they will prove it.

Whether they do or do not is secondary. Independent scientists have said for some time that human cloning is indeed quite possible, provided one is not concerned with the ethical ramifications or the very real possibility of a child with severe deformities. Of primary importance is the damage this shocking, irresponsible announcement does to the other part of cloning research, the part that could truly benefit humanity.

Therapeutic cloning to produce stem cells holds great promise for curing a wide range of human diseases and has been strongly endorsed by leading scientific organizations. The White House, Congress and much of the public have been having a hard time distinguishing between cloning as a way to make freakish carbon-copy babies and as a way to cure Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, many cancers and other diseases. Making that distinction only gets harder when what muddles the debate is either a bad hoax or horrible science.