If you think the Bush administration’s word games on “personal accounts” for Social Security is deceptive, check yourself for consistency with biotech’s switcheroo on exactly what happens in cloning:
They used to acknowledge the basic biological truth that cloning creates embryos. But now, to win a political debate, they claim cloning doesn’t create embryos or any form of life at all.
The latest to change his tune is Woo Suk Hwang. When he manufactured the first human cloned embryos, he admitted that the “products” of cloning were embryos and indeed, that “this technique [therapeutic cloning] can not be separated from reproductive people cloning…”
That was then. Now, having manufactured more human cloned embryos, he apparently has received his talking points: “I can say this result is not an embryo but a ‘nuclear transfer construct’.”
There must be some magical difference between these nuclear transfer constructs and the embryos sitting in fertility clinic freezers that biotech and certain legislators have been chomping at for stem cell research. It’s still a pretty close debate in terms of public support for and against embryonic stem cell research; I’d guess these groups are getting tired of waiting for massive public approval, so they’re launching a preemptive attack on the terms of debate.
UPDATE: Slate’s Will Saletan has a smart piece on the New York Times’ curious omission of the word “cloning” in describing Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s positions on various forms of stem cell research. The Boston papers described his views much more faithfully. The Times reporter claimed that she avoided the word “cloning” because Romney politicized it:
But “stem cell research” has been politicized, too. That phrase is now used by liberals to make people think that politicians who support publicly funded adult stem cell research, publicly funded research on some embryonic stem cell lines, and privately funded research on the remaining embryonic stem cell lines are against stem cell research. If you write in a headline that the governor “opposes stem cell work,” and you write in the lede that he’s trying to stop “a type of stem cell research,” and you bury the description of that research, and you substitute the euphemism “experimentation” for “destruction,” you aren’t eliminating bias. You’re adding it.
I’m sure it doesn’t look that way to writers and editors at the Times. I’m sure they’re calling it as they see it. But there’s a word for bias you can’t see: Yours.
The failure of major media outlets to effectively 1) differentiate between embryonic and adult research; 2) make clear that the embryonic version has never been illegal; 3) and publicize the proven success of the adult version (forget embryonic utility is still highly theoretical) is one of the great failures of American journalism in the past few years. As newsroom diversity in the popular sense has increased, a monoculture of perspective has severely compromised coverage of some of the most important issues of our time.
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.