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Send in the Clones

By Roy Peter Clark

RELATED

"Successful Embryo Cloning Documented," San Diego Union-Tribune. "Breakthrough? Lab Claims Human Embryo Cloned," TODAY Show video.

And so it has begun. News has broken that a private California clinic has produced a human clone for the purposes of extracting its stem cells. The cell donor is the scientist who heads the clinic. On the TODAY show he described what it was like to see through a microscope the blastocyst that contained his identical genetic material. He described it as going back into time, visiting the place where he began.

I had an image of Dr. Frankenstein spilling his seed in a petri dish. "I'm alive! Alive!"

In anger I yelled at the screen, "Where the hell is Arthur?!" Just as the words flew from my lips, the image of Dr. Arthur Caplan appeared on the screen, flashing a yellow light of caution on this runaway technology. Art is one of the world's preeminent biomedical ethicists, a friend, and a long-time adviser to The Poynter Institute. He is a book author, a columnist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the funniest philosophers on the face of the earth. He has been a source of wisdom and a passionate advocate in controversial cases from Karen Ann Quinlan to Terri Schiavo.

Among the many things I've learned from Arthur is that ethical and legal guidelines always come way behind the science. The science, as in this cloning case, is the genie (perhaps I should say gene) that has escaped from the bottle. Is it a good genie or a bad genie? If good, where are the benefits? If bad, how can we minimize collateral damage?

Over the long term, scientists, ethicists, theologians, and legislators will have a role to play in the development of standards and policies that will affect everything from how we make babies to how to we make money. They will help create the limits we are willing to place on science and technology.

Nuclear energy provides a simple example of a scientific technology that has been applied in beneficial and harmful ways and, more than a half-century after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is still struggling to find a leash long enough and strong enough to keep that genie from blowing up in our faces.

However this process works, journalists -- across media platforms -- should be at the center of it. We have the opportunity to keep the conversation going, not only upon occasions of breaking news, but also between moments of explosive controversy. Here are some key topics and opportunities for coverage:

1. Check out scientists who have taken their work outside of the United States to political cultures more receptive to genetic experimentation.

2. Pay attention to how presidential candidates and other politicians confront these issues, especially during debates about religious values and public health.

3. Stay alert for interesting cases, not just the dramatic ones that will inflame passions and make reasoned debate difficult (as when parents harvest genetic material from embryos to help save another child who needs a bone marrow transplant).

4. Pay attention to language, to the sad and inevitable retreat of competing forces to the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. (Look for the right to life vs. freedom of choice dichotomy to be replaced by right to life vs. quality of life.)

5. Prepare for the evocation of classic literary and philosophical precedents and analogies for the debates we are likely to have. (I've already invoked Dr. Frankenstein, and a television doctor alluded to the brave new world we have just entered.)

Any journalist who plans to report or write about cloning should go back and read Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" as well as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Huxley wrote his satirical anti-Utopia in 1932. Among the things he predicted: that children would no longer be born to loving parents, but would be "decanted from bottles." Fifteen years later he wrote this in an introduction to a new edition: "All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century."

At an ethics seminar in St. Petersburg, Fla., a journalist once asked Art Caplan something like this: "As we look back in history, we wonder at medical practices that now look so primitive or obsolete. If you could travel into the future, what current medical practices or traditions will make us look like cave dwellers?"

I was shocked by Art's answer. He said it is the way babies are born. That is, "naturally" through the birth canal of the mother. The way we do it now, he said, isn't really that healthy for the mother or the child. He saw a day down the road yonder when science would allow embryos to be incubated safely, when they could be tested for genetic weakness and repaired or disposed of if deficient, when we could select ahead of time the sex of the child and other traits as well. Laughing his throaty laugh, he said something like, "People will look back at how babies were born in the old days, all that morning sickness and throwing up, all that water breaking and bleeding, all that grunting and pushing and screaming, and they'll shake their heads and think we're barbarians."

Is that the future we want to help create? Journalists, I believe, will help shape the conversation and debate that helps society establish useful and humane boundaries for the application of scientific discoveries. During the Bush administration, science and morality have found themselves in a kind of cold war stalemate. It need not, and should not, be that way. Journalists have a key role to play.

Any advice on how journalists can cover these issues responsibly?

Full post as published by Writing Tools on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).