I should start by acknowledging that news of cloning has consumed much
of my energy for the past year. So a disclaimer: I too have clone fever
and it is contagious.by Robert Lee Hotz
Whatever its ultimate scientific or commercial importance, the unsettling fact of cloning—the ability to cultivate an entire being from a single adult cell in an act of asexual reproduction—undercut a human faith in the uniqueness of individual identity, even though it is not possible to duplicate human personality or the life experience that produces it.
Public surprise was electric. A tabloid fever infected press coverage. The infection was by no means fatal; still, a post-mortem may be in order.
I should start by acknowledging that news of cloning has consumed much
of my energy for the past year. So a disclaimer: I too have clone fever
and it is contagious.
Therefore, to reconstruct how this story reached the public, I did not rely on my own memory alone. I consulted the National Association of Science Writers; the editors of the science journal Nature, where the formal research paper was published; and researchers at the Roslin Institute. I should also mention the NASW Internet discussion groups, operated by Bob Finn, where these issues have been a topic of some discussion.
The five questions I want to raise now are not designed to criticize any individual reporter’s performance—certainly I am guilty myself of most of them—but to make us pause and consider thoughtfully how we have conducted ourselves so far in this the science story of the year, perhaps the decade.
In the first week after the news broke, scientists at the Roslin Institute, their corporate partner PPL Therapeutics and their London public relations firm, De Facto, answered more than 2,000 telephone calls, talked at length to about 100 reporters and provided access to Dolly to 16 film crews and more than 50 photographers from all over the world.
That was the first wave of a media tsunami that only now has begun to crest.
In the space of a year, more than 15,500 stories on cloning have been published; there were 1,265 major stories published just on Ian Wilmut, 839 on cloning and identity, more than 2,000 on cloning and Congress . As one sign of changing contemporary tastes there were 80 stories on cloning Madonna, compared to more than three times more—252—stories on cloning Michael Jordan. Moreover, that does not begin to encompass all the radio reports, television broadcasts and Internet newsletter accounts not indexed on Lexus-Nexis. And that is just in the English language.
By way of comparison, I should note that there were some 14,600 news stories that mentioned El Niño published during the same period. And 80 stories that mentioned both cloning and El Niño.
Numbers alone, of course, are no measure of news coverage, any more than you can judge champagne by counting the carbonated bubbles.
Was the public any wiser for having been offered so many stories? Are they now any better informed? Are we the wiser? What does it tell us about our own conduct of our craft?
When we look at the coverage more closely, what stands out?
Although most people did not learn of the Roslin Institute’s accomplishment until the Sunday morning of last February 23, most science writers were let in on the secret several days before. That is when Nature distributed a confidential advance notice of the achievement. Indeed, Wilmut had already hired a public relations firm to help field anticipated queries and had taken a media seminar to hone his television skills. And a documentary film crew was already on the scene at Roslin recording the research effort for a British television program.
I should note that a research paper published in Nature several months before in which Wilmut reported their success in cloning lambs from fetal cells had attracted almost no notice.
TWO: A remarkable—but not surprising—inability to honor embargoes.
Shortly after the Nature press advisory was distributed, the Italian ANSA news service on February 21 carried a notice of the embargoed announcement. At least three Italian newspapers, Republica, Unita and Corriere della Sera, broke the embargo that Saturday, according to Nature managing editor Peter Wrobel. Nonetheless, it was a reporter not normally privy to this embargo arrangement—an English journalist named Robin McKie—whose scoop in the Sunday Observer, five days before the scheduled publication, apparently triggered a global media stampede, according to Roslin’s assistant science director Harry Griffin.
McKie’s 1,000-word story, which Nature later determined was based on his own independent reporting and at least one confidential source, appeared in the early editions of the Sunday Observer newspaper on February 23. It then instantly leapfrogged the time zones as Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN, Agence France Presse, the BBC and the Press Association of Britain spread the news around the world.
What else do we find?
THREE: A remarkable—but not surprising—inability of reporters to keep their egos in check. A New York Times reporter who has written a book about cloning is marketing it in part with the claim that she broke this story to the American public. Indeed, the publisher has bannered the claim on the book jacket. On the one hand this sort of puffery is harmless book-agent flackery.
However, it distort events for marketing purposes in a way that should make one wary. Certainly a suspicious reader—of whom there are no shortage these days—could legitimately question whether the most even-keeled reporter might be tempted, by the confluence of ambition and book-contract incentives, to tilt news stories toward the sensational to help build a favorable sales climate, especially through a newspaper read so carefully by the publishing industry and that so powerfully influences the rest of the media.
FOUR: We also find a remarkable but not surprising willingness to repeat claims made by other reporters without verifying them independently.
Consider the story of Richard Seed—the Chicago physicist who voiced his determination to clone a human being.
In barely two months, there have been 736 major stories mentioning Richard Seed, with a dramatic effect on public policy by reviving efforts to enact a legislative ban on human cloning research. But only one—as best I can tell—verified the key fact that made Seed a proper subject of journalistic attention, which was that a well-equipped and reputable infertility clinic was prepared to support Seed’s effort to clone a human being. Before airing his report on Seed, NPR reporter Joe Palca had met with that clinic—the only reporter to do so—but he has not revealed its name, nor has anyone else identified it, as far as I have been able to tell.
Yet countless reporters treated Seed’s claim seriously, based—one must assume on blind faith and the pressure not to be left behind by a pack in full bay.
What makes this especially interesting in my view is that at least a half-dozen science writers heard Seed make his claims at a Chicago law school conference in early December and at least two of them reported Seed’s plan at the time. Yet not until NPR aired Palca’s fine report a month later—and NPR papered newsrooms across the country with advance transcripts in an effort to draw attention to his broadcast—did it become the story that no one could ignore.
So were we reacting to Joe Palca’s excellent reporting—I want to repeat that—excellent reporting—or to NPR’s aggressive marketing of his story? To what degree, we may wonder, did NPR become Richard Seed’s press agent?
It left a number of us who had already met Seed and rejected his claims—myself included—with an interesting deadline dilemma.
So, to conclude,
FIVE: We find a remarkable (but not surprising) over-riding eagerness to indulge in speculative ethics, at the expense of sober, factual reporting. Scores of stories have dwelt glibly on the what-ifs of human cloning, with little more than lip service paid to the enormous and perhaps insurmountable difficulties attending any such attempt.
This is talk-show science.
In comparison, remarkably few stories have explored what the cloners themselves have clearly stated from the beginning as their goal—the use of cloning as a vehicle for introducing genetic change, which in the short run is much easier to accomplish technically and which in the long run may turn out to be infinitely more unsettling ethically.
The potential moral pitfalls of cloning are at least as interesting as the science itself, I agree, but so long as such speculation is not solidly grounded in the hard science from which it springs, we allow the pundits and the public to treat science simply as a special effect.
Cloning is hard, so hard that no one has yet duplicated Wilmut’s feat and confirmed the original experiment.
In that light, we should miss no opportunity to remind our readers that biology—like journalism—is a messy, uncertain business.