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?
I hold journalists more responsible for misperceptions of news media...
