Cloning


December 1, 2001


BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. When a small biotech company called Advanced Cell Technology announced this week that it had cloned a human embryo, headlines blazed across the country and much of the world. President Bush condemned the experiment. One senator called for a ban on research. Religious groups staged protests, and the opinion pages ominously opined. "Act wisely, not quickly," said the St. Louis Post Dispatch. "Don't Stifle Research," replied the L.A. Times. "Cloning a moral dead end," said the Dallas Morning News. Meanwhile reporters struggled through a thicket of scientific ethical and political issues, among them NPR science correspondent Joe Palca. Joe, welcome to the show.

JOE PALCA: Thanks. Glad to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: First of all is this really the big news that it was touted as?

JOE PALCA: From a scientific standpoint it's-- extremely modest. You could even call it a failure. But from a political, social standpoint the interest in this issue has been phenomenal because the public and certainly Congress is extremely interested in the question of whether anybody should be allowed to create embryos using cloning technology.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post put together a couple of news reports, one from U.S. News & World Report, that suggested that they had successfully engineered the world's first cloned human embryo and then the one from the New York Times that said cloning experts outside the company said the experiment was a failure. So we can't tell, or a cursory reading of the paper wouldn't necessarily yield that important nugget of information.

JOE PALCA: The problem is, is a semantic one in a sense, because if you say that this 6-celled thing is an embryo then the truth is that they did create a cloned embryo! It's the first one! The fact that it wasn't viable; the fact that it didn't reach the point where they w-- they were hoping to derive stem cells from it; the fact that they don't even know whether the genetic material inside that embryo was actually directing its reproduction or whether this was some vestigial reproduction left over from an activated egg -- there's a lot of scientific questions that have, haven't been answered. I think we can be fairly certain that it's a better story both from the company's standpoint and from the news media's standpoint to say: We've cloned the first embryo! Cause it's a hundred percent true. The fact that you then have to say but it died almost immediately or it con-- didn't grow and it was m-- you know - not even sure it was a successful experiment -- well you could put that into the third paragraph or the fourth paragraph.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How would you assess the way news outlets have been handling the story then in general?

JOE PALCA:I think in general it's so easy to confuse terminology here, because we never used to talk about what's an embryo. An embryo was something you got when you had an egg with a sperm and it started to grow! That was an embryo! Now we've got something that, you know, it is an embryo because it's got no sperm and even part of the egg has been changed. I mean what is this thing? So there's a terminology issue, and there's also the question of what people mean by cloning. Everybody now thinks of cloning as creating an entire new animal! Dolly was a cloned sheep. But there are things you can do with cloning technology that are never intended to grow into a live human being! It's just complicated. The terminology is not in the public's mind so clearly that you can just throw it around, and so you wind up spending a lot of time in any news story, if you do it responsibly, talking about technical details, which you know a lot of people when you get into technical details in science, they start to glaze over a little bit.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:This kind of story is so fraught with social implications that it's in the interest of science and in the interest of advocates to adjust the terminology -- adjust the, the way that these issues are addressed. What, what are some of those phrases that you say aren't yet in the public mind that science would like to put there?

JOE PALCA: In terms of what the scientists are talking about they're simply saying well let's call this technique what it is -- it's somatic cell nuclear transfer -- but, you know, that's not a term that trips off the tongue, and so I think scientists realize they've got to try something different. You know, I don't think it's going to be just a question of picking the right names for these things to make everybody say oh, yes, I see what you mean and we all agree now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:On Sunday and Monday when you saw this story reported either on television or in the newspapers or on the radio, was there any story or any particular take that had you wringing your hands, going no, no, no!

JOE PALCA: [LAUGHS] The only mistake or inaccuracy is to over-state the importance of an incremental change for the purpose of making a good story. The incremental scientific advance here was extremely modest. But the story nonetheless was a good one, and from a societal standpoint, I think an important one. And so if I ever say oh, no, no, I can't believe that -- it's because these stories take on a life that has little to do with the in-- their intrinsic scientific importance.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Joe, thank you very much.

JOE PALCA: You're welcome!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Joe Palca is a science correspondent for National Public Radio.