“He was very skilled at putting things very simply, and glossing over the complicated details that were usually present,” said Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Roy J. Glauber.

Guillen juggled his teaching duties at the College with a job as the official science reporter for the ABC television program “Good Morning, America.”

“One week they would send him off to report on a ferry being built in Sweden, then the next week it would be something in Australia relating to wildlife,” Glauber said. “He had an agreement that they would always have him back to Cambridge in time to teach his section on Friday.”

Thomas Kaenzig, vice president of Clonaid and a spiritual guide of the Raelian movement, said that the company had been successful and that its discovery will help infertile or homosexual couples throughout the world.

“Every pioneering work is blasted and ridiculed,” he said. “Look back at the first people who said that the earth was a ball.... We’re not here to help the skeptics, we’re here to help people with special issues—infertile couples, homosexual couples, people with sexually-transmitted diseases.”

According to Louis M. Guenin, a lecturer on ethics and science at Harvard Medical School, cloning has little value as an alternate means of human reproduction.

“I find very few scenarios where a couple would prefer cloning over artificial fertilization followed by prenatal genetic diagnosis, which allows a couple to screen candidate embryos,” Guenin said.

Although the scientific merit of the Raelians’ work is still very dubious, the attention surrounding their claims may have an impact on the current debates over stem cell research.

There are currently two bills in Congress that would ban human cloning. One would ban all forms of cloning and stem cell research. Another would ban only cloning intended to make a human, while still allowing stem cells to be taken from embryos for tissue research.

The fears of cloning raised by the Raelians may make it more difficult for stem cell research supporters.

“It can only embolden the folks who oppose stem cell research,” said Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of state and federal relations.

—Staff writer Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at mohammed@fas.harvard.edu.