The fear of cloning

If we are to believe the Daily Mail, US scientists have cloned the first human embryo — and destroyed it. This revelation came in the form of a Daily Mail ‘exclusive’, which appeared on 17 June. The headline announced the “first cloned human embryo,” and was accompanied by a front-page picture of a “12-day-old male human embryo consisting of 400 cells” that was reported to have been incinerated two days after the photograph had been taken. Its creators were scientists at American Cell Technology (ACT), a small privately held biotech company in Worcester, Massachusetts. The story was picked up by the tabloid press in Europe and comparisons between ACT scientists and God were plentiful. Witness, for example, the 18 June headline of Bild Zeitung, which has a readership of 4 million Germans: “They’ve really done it! They’ve taken themselves for God!” Most of these European newspapers were quite unconcerned about repeating the Daily Mail story without verification, sometimes almost verbatim. The picture, it seemed, was all the proof that was needed to persuade the editors of the story’s authenticity. In France, however, the vast majority of press accounts were suprisingly more discerning in their treatment of the story and the issues surrounding cloning. On 19 June, Libération, the respected French left-wing daily, revealed that the infamous photograph was not of a cloned human embryo but of a culture of human embryonic stem cells. Information for the Libération piece came direct from the source — ACT. Le Nouvel Observateur, which described the Daily Mail story as a “false alert” explained to its readers that the photograph was “no closer to the first cloned human embryo than a piece of bark is to an entire tree.” L’Express branded the Daily Mail scoop a “coup de bluff” and wrote that the “financial stakes of human cloning are such that some will not hesitate to fake a story.” The successful isolation of stem cells from aborted human fetuses and from IVF-generated embryos was reported last November in Science and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by two American teams — both funded by Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, California.