Sheep fever

“Send in the clones” (Newsweek), “Brave new world” (Los Angeles Times) and “Could we now raise the dead?” (London Daily Mail ) were three of the headlines triggered by the announcement from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh of a viable lamb derived from an adult mammary cell [1]. Perhaps encouraged by team leader Ian Wilmut’s explanation of the name given to Dolly (“We couldn’t think of a more impressive set than Dolly Parton’s”), the world’s press had a field day. Yet it was for the most part a field day to applaud. From New Zealand to Finland, most journalists sought to purvey accurate information rather than striving for sensation. The technical feat was unusually well explained, and often placed in the context of previous Roslin Institute work on cloning from sheep embryos and even John Gurdon’s work with frogs 30 years ago. Particularly notable were the many reports in which ideas headlined to attract readers’ attention were addressed in more sober fashion, and often repudiated, in the story below. “To make hundreds of human clones, you have to assume the acquiescence of hundreds of women eager to rent out their wombs for political or commercial profit, a scarcely credible notion,” wrote Robin McKie who broke the story in the Observer in London. “A clone of Saddam Hussein would not necessarily covet Kuwait,” the Chicago Tribune assured readers in an account of what genetic identity really means. It was in Germany where the media voiced the strongest anxieties about the possible extension of the new technology beyond farm animals. “The cloning of human beings would fit precisely into Adolf Hitler’s world view,” said the Berlin-based Die Welt. Multiple Hitlers also appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel. One of the most striking aspects of British coverage, alongside journalistic reportage, was a prolific outpouring of opinion from newspaper columnists. Within hours of hearing the news from Edinburgh, they were holding forth on developmental biology when, on a different day, the topic would just as readily have been motor racing or politicians’ hairstyles. “If we prefer the illusory control of cloning to the glorious gamble of life, we will be interfering with nature in a way far more arrogant and dangerous than ever before,” Libby Purves opined in The Times.