Can't the press do something besides clone around?


When Claudio Stern, chairman of Columbia's Genetics Department, is asked for his reaction to the story about Dolly, Ian Wilmut's cloned lamb, his answer is swift: "I'm sort of fed up with it," he laughs. And he's disappointed with how the media handled the story. "It really has highlighted how quickly people form an opinion on something they don't know about."

Stern's experience as a pundit during the media hubbub included an interview for CBS radio. The reporter asked whom he would clone, if he could clone one person. "I think he was expecting me to say 'myself,' but I didn't. I told him all the people I admired, I admired because they were unique -- and therefore I wouldn't clone anybody," recalls Stern.

Bob Pollack got the call early the morning the story broke: Canadian National Broadcasting wanted his comments. Pollack, professor of biology at Columbia, insisted on reading the report in Nature first, "just to make sure it's not cold fusion." (The story had hit the New York Times, but the source paper wasn't out yet in the United States) "They said, 'We don't have a copy; we read about it in the Times.' I said, 'I can't do this.' They said, 'Come on, everybody's doing it.' I said, 'I can't pass judgment on a paper that was submitted to peer review unless I, as a peer, review it. I've got to read the damn paper.' That kept me off the air."

Both Pollack and Stern note interesting features of the actual work that popular press accounts missed completely. After Pollack got to "read the damn paper," he noticed that the authors were "very cagey not to say they cloned from an adult cell, just a cell from an adult." Pollack predicts there's a fair possibility that Wilmut's group has discovered that embryonic stem cells persist in the adult body. If so, there's less to the story than meets the eye, since the same authors had cloned from embryo cells back in 1994. Says Pollack: "Right now all we know is that a female mammal cell, possibly a stem cell, possibly an embryonic leftover, possibly a real adult differentiated cell -- the paper doesn't know -- will make a clone at about a 1:200 ratio. The paper is explicit that they haven't excluded any of these possibilities." From his comparison of the paper and the press accounts, Pollack posits a "news axiom" for bad science reporting: "You ignore the possibility mentioned by the authors that their result might be real but less interesting, in favor of the maximum interpretation."

Stern notes that the technique did not produce what he would define as a true clone. "It's not true that this is a genetically identical copy," he says; "it's less identical than identical twins." DNA is present not only in the cell nucleus (the entity transplanted in Dolly's instance), but also in the mitochondria. Says Stern, "Since the genetic material of the mitochondria of the so-called cloned sheep is different from that of the donor, the two sheep are not identical. They have a lot of genes that are not the same." Both remark on how quickly the discussion in the media springboarded from the actual work to speculations on the possibility and consequences of human cloning. And they differ on the ethical questions. Pollack is firm about human clones: "Never, never, never. People are not to be bred for a purpose. People are meant to be born for a life of their own in which their experiences are unknown to the people who make them." He believes President Clinton's quick reaction and moratorium were appropriate. Stern, while not necessarily in favor of human cloning, feels strongly that flat moratoria on research are ill-advised, citing the period when work in recombinant DNA was blocked as setting back research all over the globe. He refers to the president's edict as a "nervous twitch."

Among other things, the story launched an avalanche of humor in the press -- everything from scatological speculations about why Scots chose sheep as cloning subjects to cartoons galore. Punning was too tempting for most editors to pass up. "Send In The Clones" was inevitable. A cartoon in the New Yorker featured one annoyed sheep staring into the face of another saying, "Ewe, again." Time magazine's cover presented a "digital photo montage" of two Dolly close-ups and the banner "Will There Ever Be Another You"? The magazine also considered the story unusual enough to warrant commissioning a piece of fiction for the occasion, "Clone, Clone on the Range." The essay "Will We Follow the Sheep?" was illustrated with five shots of Dennis Rodman's face and very red hair, and a speculation that the NBA commisioner would never sanction an all-clone team.

On a different note, in a news brief editors couldn't resist titling "Silence of the Lamb," the New Yorker visited the Roslin Institute (where the work occurred) and reported on a rare "media-free day" when neither Dolly nor her handlers nor any of the scientists involved could be found for photos or commentary.

"Humor is a way we deal with things we don't understand," says James Carey, professor of journalism at Columbia. "The joking," he finds, "seems to be symptomatic of a kind of underlying nervousness about the whole damn thing." Carey, who teaches journalistic ethics, is interested in larger cultural questions raised by this research. "When one looks at Dolly, one thinks, 'Well, suppose I was staring at a human being. What would this be? It looks like a man, it walks like a man, but is it? How do we treat it? Do we invoke a common morality around it? Or is it something we've made, that falls within a different set of ethical coordinates?'"

Confronting the possibility of human cloning, to Carey, causes "a kind of confusion in our conceptual machinery. It erases common sense. We think of common sense not merely as a kind of cognitive map of the world but also a kind of ethical map." Perhaps the media response reflects anxieties over the truly unprecedented: "We don't share a vocabulary with which to adequately talk to one another about this. Inevitably we try to jiggle and repair older vocabularies, which no longer seem to fit this situation. It is all that we have at the moment."

Carey sums up the current dilemma at Columbia and everywhere else this way: "There's a lot of calling up of people and asking, 'How do you think we're going to handle the ethics of this?' But the real answer is: 'I have no idea at all.'" --John Green


Related links...

  • Cloning: A Special Report in New Scientist

  • Tim Beardsley, "The Start of Something Big?" Scientific American, May 1997

  • Ruth Hubbard, "Irreplaceable Ewe," The Nation

  • Andrew Berry, "Sheep Thrills: How Dolly Was Designed," Slate


    JOHN GREEN is a free-lance science writer and new media developer whose articles have appeared in 21stC, Wired, Popular Computing, and other publications. He is the author of The New Age of Communications (NY: Henry Holt, 1997).

    PHOTO CREDIT: Jonathan Smith; art, Howard Roberts.