ESSAY

Eve Redux: The Public Confusion over Cloning
By Stephen S. Hall

As any well-informed newspaper reader knows by now, the white-robed prophet Rael (neé Claude Vorilhon) is a soft-spoken, French-born, Canadian-based apostle of cloning technology who claims to have been conceived by a human mother and a space alien. The former race car driver also claims to have had two encounters with aliens in the 1970s and to have boarded their spaceship. He believes that humans were created by cloning techniques developed by alien civilizations, and he has established a sect called the Raelians to promote human reproductive cloning, to the point of forming a private company called Clonaid. Rael considers himself a half-brother to Jesus Christ and requests that visitors address him as "Your Holiness."

In the calculus of most working journalists, the combination of UFO-ology, prophetic megalomania, and alien conception would ordinarily land Rael and his followers on the gentle, lowland slopes of any credibility curve. And yet a steady stream of writers-sometimes from prominent publications-have made the pilgrimage to "U.F.O.-land" in Valcourt, Quebec, to interview Rael (apparently some even agreed to submit questions in advance and call him "Your Holiness"). For its loony entertainment value, Rael and his be-robed colleagues make for an irresistible human interest story, but that also helps explain why Raelian claims to have created a cloned human child named "Eve" received such widespread and frenzied attention in the press in December 2002. Although the sect did not provide a shred of scientific evidence to back up its claim, the news prompted a familiar, even reflexive cultural reaction: social conservatives fulminated, the president reiterated his absolute opposition to all forms of cloning, and respectable scientists were left shaking their heads.

In a larger sense, that reaction helps explain why the national debate on cloning and stem cell research has so often spun off the road and into a ditch of techno-social voyeurism, ideological rhetoric, and political histrionics. While reporting for my book Merchants of Immortality, I've been a front-row observer to many events in this debate, and I've been struck by several recurrent themes: overreaction by both the press and politicians to sensational (and often unsubstantiated) claims, the absence of critical judgment in assessing these claims, the role of private entities (whether biotech companies or sects) in setting the tempo and terms of the public debate with their announcements, and a devaluation of science in the overall discourse. The public, and policymakers, have been poorly served by the quality of this important bioethical discussion.

A key moment in this debate occurred in August 2001, at a workshop on cloning sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, because it revealed an illuminating gap between the rigorous, devil-in-the-details ethos of science and the rather more superficial world of public perception. Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute, described detailed molecular studies that identified a series of glitches embedded in the DNA of cloned mice. These so-called "epigenetic" flaws-aberrations in the regulation or expression of genes but not in the genetic sequence of the genes themselves-could trigger arrested development or serious post-natal dysfunction. After Jaenisch laid out the data, a member of the National Academy panel directed a question at Brigitte Boisselier, the head scientist of Clonaid, who had previously described the Raelians' intent to clone human babies. What, she was asked, was Clonaid doing to identify the sort of epigenetic flaws that Jaenisch's group had described in the scientific literature?

Boisselier dipped her head politely, smiled reassuringly, and announced in an eerily lilting voice that Clonaid scientists had already developed molecular assays to test for ten such epigenetic flaws in human embryos. The claim was absurd. I was sitting in the audience that day, and almost fell out of my chair. Developing reliable molecular probes for such potential genetic aberrations would tax the ingenuity and resources of any top-flight laboratory, probably for years. Several members of the NAS panel of experts reacted with an unusually public display of scorn to Boisselier's claim, rolling their eyes or shaking their heads in disgust. "Ludicrous," grunted Alan Trounson, an Australian in vitro fertilization expert.

Yet the preposterousness of Boisselier's claim is, for most lay readers, probably lost in the fog of scientific minutiae, and that is the hize into which much of the substance of this debate has disappeared. I had expected Trounson's bluntly dismissive tone to permeate news accounts of the National Academy forum the following day, but I was surprised. While the accounts were skeptical, they were politely so, and more attention was focused on the intent of the would-be cloners than on a clear-eyed assessment of their chances of success. And so it hardly came as a surprise that when Brigitte Boisselier held a press conference on 27 December 2002, to announce the birth of the world's first human clone, the press greeted the news in similar fashion: it dutifully reported the claim, but it remained perhaps a little too polite and a little slow to contextualize and critically assess the scientific claims. The claim, however dubious, made front-page news around the world, and served as a global infomercial for Raelian philosophy. "Some media experts say we got between $600 million and $700 million worth of coverage," Rael later boasted, "and I did nothing." Neither, apparently, did the Raelian cloners. By January 2003, Rael was also conceding to some interviewers that he couldn't deny the baby clone was a hoax.

In one sense, the purported birth of "Eve," the first human clone, was an aberration; within days of the initial claim, the event had the odor of a hoax-as it should have had to anyone with passing familiarity with either the technical vicissitudes of cloning ("somatic cell nuclear transfer," to use the technical term) or the savvy self-marketing of the Raelians. But in another sense, the short, nasty, and brutal life of this unconfirmable story is emblematic of precisely the types of events that have convulsed the national debate about cloning and, earlier, embryonic stem cells over the past few years. Each such revelation triggers a drearily familiar set-piece: lawmakers threaten legislation, social conservatives express moral outrage, scientists run for cover, and the public is left feeling fearful and confused.

The public debate on cloning, as on embryonic stem cells, has repeatedly been driven by these extra-scientific (not to say extraterrestial) announcements mediated by the press. These events undoubtedly qualify as news, and yet at the same time do not qualify as science-if we understand the latter to be a rigorously executed, socially responsible, and peer-reviewed published piece of experimentation that, pending reproducibility, at least has the whiff of truth about it. If the ethical implications of this research are too important to be left to scientists alone, as many observers have correctly asserted, it is also true that the scientific details of this research are too important to be misunderstood, misrepresented, or dismissed by non-scientists-that includes not only members of the media, but also politicians, ideologues, entrepreneurs, bioethicists, and even the scientists who sometimes imply too strenuously that therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapy will surely cure human disease. The first casualty in a heated political debate about science is complexity, and modern biological science is nothing if not a monument to complexity.

When I was a young aspiring writer living in Rome, I was asked by a prominent business newspaper to cover financial news, a topic about which I had no training and no knowledge. The request came on a Friday. Over the weekend, I purchased a copy of "Teach Yourself Economics." On Monday, I began filing dispatches.

I mention this because on any given story, especially on technical topics like stem cells and cloning, news coverage will reflect a broad spectrum of expertise and inexperience, and this becomes a factor in the public life of a technological idea. In point of fact, the Eve announcement received judicious and skeptical treatment in major newspapers, which reported the "news" (as indeed is their mission to do) but kept this dubious claim off the front page. Nonetheless, a certain politesse operates in objective journalism that renders critical assessment subservient to even-handedness. I would argue that critical judgment-not technical understanding, not explanatory skill, not even literary talent-is the single most important quality for anyone who aspires to write about science and technology; it is also, by far, the most difficult skill to acquire. The absence of critical judgment, the demands of competition, and the unremitting pressure of deadlines helps create the kind of media epiphenomena that characterized the cloning of Eve and the earlier announcement of the creation of cloned human embryos by the Massachusetts company Advanced Cell Technology.

Critical judgment becomes especially important in this arena because so much information is obscured by a proprietary fog; "news" is often released without prior peer-review publication, and always with an eye toward maximum publicity. Much of cloning and stem cell research is conducted by the private sector or with private funding, outside the purview of the NIH; there is no federal pressure or moral suasion to be candid with the public. Indeed, when bioethicists who advise private companies refuse to discuss ongoing research, as has happened in my experience, they promote (however reluctantly) the privatization of a national debate that requires absolute transparency.

In the last year or so, several bioethicists I respect have intimated that science writers too often function as mindless cheerleaders of technological innovation, that they are camp followers who plunge headlong in the direction of Progress while leaving their moral compasses at home. Speaking only for myself, I do not see my role as that of a cheerleader, but I plead guilty to a fascination with serious intellectual inquiry, aided by powerful technologies, to attain new knowledge, new understanding, and new plateaus of appreciation for the natural world in which we live. In fact, over the years I've managed to offend many of my secular humanist friends (my background is in English literature) by suggesting that science represents the last avant garde in contemporary society. By that I mean not only a loosely institutionalized quest for the new, but a kind of New that has the power to force society to rethink some of its most basic premises. Many of the bioethical debates we are now having attest to the power of the changes wrought, or promised, by contemporary biology, and in fact were anticipated many decades ago by the American philosopher John Dewey. In his 1922 book Human Nature and Conduct, John Dewey wrote "situations into which change and the unexpected enter are a challenge to intelligence to create new principles. Morals must be a growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life is a moving affair in which old moral truth ceases to apply." To the extent that science, too, is a moving affair, it constantly challenges the traditional notion that moral wisdom is fixed and absolute.

Setting aside for a moment the suspicion that so much indignant ink, legislative breast-beating, and ideological emotion about Eve may have been expended on a non-event, there were very good scientific reasons to suspect the Raelian claim was a hoax. Indeed, the scientific odds against a successful human clone-and by success, I mean the creation of a viable, genetically intact embryo that develops into a normal, healthy child-are overwhelming. The success rate in animal cloning experiments varies from species to species, but has always been very low, on the order of 3 or 4 per cent. In primates-the animals closest to humans on the phylogenetic ladder-hundreds of cloning experiments have failed to produce a single viable embryo, much less a live birth. Anyone who has sat through a recitation of this dismal data at a scientific meeting (and I have) becomes an instant agnostic about the prospects for a healthy human clone any time soon.

An equally distressing media circus occurred in November 2001, when researchers at ACT, including Jose Cibelli, announced they had created "the first human cloned embryo." The disconnect between the scientific and cultural appraisal of this experiment underscores the problem of critical judgment. While Harold Varmus, former director of the NIH, and Harvard biologist Douglas Melton were writing that the experiment "showed little experimental progress and advanced no new ideas," the editor of Scientific American, which published an "exclusive" account of the work, was telling reporters the ACT research represented "one of the major landmarks of biotechnology achievement in the past decade."

This shear between public and professional perception brings us closer to the underlying structural flaw of the entire debate. The National Institutes of Health has been relegated, by politics and long-standing social divisions, to a diminished role in supporting, monitoring, and shaping stem cell and cloning research (a role to which it has been consigned in reproductive medicine for more than twenty-five years). As a result, this area of science and technology has been driven by private enterprise rather than public accountability, lurid rhetoric rather than the rigor of scientific fact.

The private sector development of in vitro fertilization in the United States grew directly out of the failure of the government to act in the 1970s on recommendations by a pioneering bioethics panel, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which concluded that fetal and embryo research was a legitimate area of scientific inquiry worthy of federal funding but that such research required the consideration and approval of an Ethics Advisory Board. As many readers of the Hastings Center Report no doubt recall, the Ethics Advisory Board's recommendation to support research in reproductive medicine was never implemented, and that goes a long way toward explaining why we're having the same old disagreements today, focused though they are on a newer technology. Although the EAB considered, and ultimately approved, federal funds for in vitro fertilization research (including the study of embryos created by IVF that might ultimately be sacrificed), Patricia Harris, then secretary of HEW, refused to grant final approval, and then allowed the charter of the ethics board to expire-even though federal regulations required its approval for certain types of research to proceed. The practical effect of this limbo has been that reproductive medicine, including research on infertility and fertilization technology, was ceded to the private sector, and very few researchers in reproductive medicine sought funding from the NIH. That appears to be the evolving case with embryonic stem cells as well. A highly placed NIH official recently confided to me that the agency has been surprised that so few researchers have applied for stem cell funding.

Although the privatization of research has its roots in the 1970s, history has repeated itself more recently. Corporate funding for human embryonic stem cell research grew directly out of the Clinton administration's famous repudiation of the NIH's 1994 Human Embryo Research Panel report, which advocated federal funding for a broad spectrum of embryo research, including the creation of embryos for research purposes. The flight to private funding sources accelerated when Congress in 1996 passed a ban on federal funding for any form of embryo research-a ban enacted without public debate by conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This decades-long ability of politics to trump expert scientific judgment has shaped the rhetorical environment in which our current discussions take place. Scientific fact and judgment have increasingly been estranged from the conversation. Much of the "debate" over embryonic stem cell research, for example, hinged on assertions that adult stem cell research promises the same clinical benefits without any of the same ethical vexations. Those assertions are at their core scientifically based, with profound medical implications for all Americans, and yet you would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of scientists who subscribe to that argument.

One of those scientists, David Prentice of Indiana State University, advised senators, testified in Congress, and was quoted in countless media reports, yet he had not published a single peer-reviewed research article on stem cells and in fact had been turned down for an NIH grant for stem cell-related work. As Thomas Murray has suggested, the opponents of embryonic stem cell research may have learned a tactic from the tobacco industry: that of creating the appearance of a scientific controversy or disagreement when in reality there was none. In a 2001 report on stem cell research, the NIH reflected the judgment of the overwhelming majority of scientists in suggesting that it is too early in the scientific story to choose one technology over the other.

This same devaluation of scientific knowledge has long been a feature of the cloning debate. Reproductive cloning (to create children) is widely and legitimately opposed, not least because of safety issues, but it has become rhetorically coupled to therapeutic, or research, cloning (which seeks to create short-lived embryos from which embryonic stem cells can be harvested, for both research and perhaps therapeutic applications). Opponents of cloning argue that research cloning will inevitably lead to reproductive cloning, and that the instrumentalization of nascent human life is a moral line that should never be crossed. But these important moral concerns hinge on scientific distinctions that are either misunderstood or largely ignored.

Representative David Weldon, who has sponsored several bills in the House of Representatives to ban all forms of human cloning (including cloning for research), asserted during a House debate in July 2001, "The biological fact is, and I say this as a scientist and as a physician, that [cloned embryos] are indistinguishable from a human embryo that has been created by sexual fertilization." In terms of genetic integrity and life potential, at the very least, this is demonstrably incorrect. A "natural" embryo has, at best, a 28 per cent chance of resulting in a human life, and perhaps as little as 14 per cent-much less potential than many people are aware. But a cloned embryo has, according to current knowledge, even less potential. Part of the reason is that the vast majority of cloned embryos appear to be genetically flawed. Research by Rudolf Jaenisch's lab has documented that many genes in the cloned embryo are dysfunctional, probably due to incomplete reprogramming.

These scientific facts about the minimal "nascence" of nascent life should inform our thinking about the moral significance of embryos as they cross successive developmental thresholds, which in turn should inform discussions about the ethical acceptibility of this research. For the most part, they have not.

Ironically, the rise of in vitro fertilization has resulted in the creation of hundreds of thousands of human embryos that, if not strictly for research purposes, are destined to be discarded as a by-product of medical utility. By some estimates, American fertility clinics created as many as 600,000 embryos between 1991 and 2001, and most were destroyed-a price society appears willing to pay to treat infertility. It is hard to argue that creating cloned human embryos for research purposes, with their even more limited potential for life and their considerable potential to relieve human suffering, represents a significantly different moral threshold.

That moral paradox brings me to a final observation. I've been struck, and a little disappointed, by how much the current debate has been driven by the promise of medical utility rather than by the value of basic knowledge. Although the possible human medical benefits of embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning are not difficult to surmise, equal value lies in basic research on human development-a compelling biological mystery that has fascinated humanity's keenest minds since Aristotle. While some have made the argument that to instrumentalize this nascent human life is an affront to human dignity, I see it differently; to refrain from plumbing the mystery of human life, on the only planet known to possess any life at all, when we have the ethical infrastructure to do it both wisely and well, seems to mark a retreat from the way we have pursued knowledge for many centuries. When anatomists first began to conduct human dissections during the dawn of the Renaissance, it provoked great moral anguish and a sense of violation that, at some level, must have seemed like an affront to human dignity. But then as now, the preservation of an abstract notion of human dignity may have as a material cost the willful preservation of human ignorance and a perverse perpetuation of human suffering.
Until we bring more rigor and less emotion to our discussion of these new technologies, our public policy will again and again become hostage to hoaxes, publicity stunts, and rhetorical excess. Late in March 2003, Brigitte Boisselier and Rael were back in the news, popping up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to announce that Clonaid had successfully created five human clones. As before, they did not produce any scientific evidence to support the claim, and as before, the press dutifully passed along the news. Why Sao Paulo? As the Reuters account noted, Boisselier and Rael "were in Brazil to present Rael's book on cloning."

This essay appears in the May-June 2003 issue of the Hastings Center Report.