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March 24,1997

and full public financing of campaigns. Wellstone and Senator

John Kerry plan to introduce a similar measure in Congress.
Polls have shown as many as 68 percent of Americans support
. public financing of campaigns, so long as it ends special-interest
contributionsto candidates.
Its time. The whole election finance issue is not about good
govementyY
but simple democratization.

Irreplaceable Ewe
n February 22, the cloning of m a l s stopped being science
fiction and became science. The newspapers that day reported
that Dr. Ian Wilmut, an embryologistin Edinburgh,had cloned
a sheep named Dolly. Before we consider the wider ramifications of this accomplishment,let us note two things. One is the
order of events. First Dr. Wilmut patented the procedure, then he
announced his achievement to the press and then his paper appeared in the British journal Nature, informing other scientists
about the details of what he had done. Business before science.
The other is that Dolly is not a true copy, or clone, of the original ewe. True, Dolly has the same DNA (or genes) in the nucleus
of her cells. But, although embryologists have a way of forgetting it, an egg is not an empty bag containing nothing but a
nucleus, transplanted or not. Eggs also contain structural and
metabolic equipment, including a complement of extranuclear
DNA specific to that individual. The second ewe did not contribute her nucleus, but she did contribute the rest of the contents of her egg. The reconstituted egg was then gestated in the
uterus of yet another ewe. Dolly is, indeed, a nuclear DNA clone,
but there is more to life than DNA, even for sheep.
,
In the analogous human experiment,the donor of the nucleus
and the cloned baby would be related less closely than so-called
identical twins,because such twins develop from the same egg
and are gestated simultaneouslyby the same woman. And anyone
familiar with identical twins knows that while more similar than
other siblings, they are far from carbon copies. This new technology raises serious political and social concerns, but these concerns do not arise from the fact that we can now copy ourselves
over and over. We cannot; cloning humans is scientificallybogus.
But even bogus science can have political consequences.
What interests Dr. Wilmut and other genetic engineers is
that the new process should enable them to replicate mammals
whose DNA has been engineered to produce pharmaceuticals
and perhaps even organs for human use, so that they become
lucrative living factories.
As might be expected, Dr. Wilmut accompanied his announcement with the statement that he would find it offensiveto use the technology on humans, but that offers little
reassurance that people wont try. Last week it was sheep, this
week monkeys. Whos next? The publicity generated by Dolly
offers the opportunity to face in earnest the social and political
issues raised by genetic engineering. For too long, biotechnology has been portrayed as the new frontier that will rescue the
economy. But in whose interest? The biotechnology industry is
highly robotized, not labor intensive. It can realize profits for

March 24,1997

TheNation.

Bags

the rich but not remedy our economic problems.

Do we really want to manufactureanimals on the assembly line
and look on them not as live organisms but as relatively cheap
factories that can yield profitable products? Generate people for
spare parts? Achieve personal immortality?A baby is and always
will be a person in her or his own right, not a commodity or a substitute for someone else. w e all know what childrendo when they
become aware of their parents fondest expectations for them.)
President Clinton has responded by banning use of federal
funds for cloning humans, requesting voluntary restraint from
the private sector and activating a bioethics panel. Those may be
first steps. But decisions that affect our basic relationships with
one another and the rest of nature must not be left to a handful
of carefully selected scientists, bioethicists, lawyers and clergy.
Anyone can predict from such a panel what recommendations
will be forthcoming.
Clearly, reproductivetechnologiesmust not be driven by market forces and need to be regulated. But in a democracy, deliberations about social and political concerns of this magnitude must
not happen behind closed doors. We need town meetings, public
hearings, forums where people can become informed about the
antisocialimplicationsof these technologies and discusshow best
to rein them in. Recommendations of expert panels and Congressional action should grow from such activities,not pre-empt them.
If we are afraid of another Nazi empire trying to clone a
master race (whether or not its scientificallyfeasible), we must
destroy the political possibility that such an empire could arise.
We can regulate and legislatethe details. The fundamentals have
to be part of our shared values about the kind of society in which
RUTHHUBBARD
we want to live.
Ruth Hubbard, a professor emerita of biology at Haiyard Universiv,
is a board member of the Councilfor Responsible Genetics. She is the
author (with Elijah Wald)OfExplodipg the Gene Myth (Beacon),among
other boob, and editor (with Lynda Birke) of Reinventing Biology:
Respect for Life and the Creation of Knowledge (Indiana).

Lionizing Journalism
Its Identity Crisis time again in journalism. The
cause isthe recent Food Lion case, in which a
jury awarded the supermarket giant $5.5 million
from ABC. The case arose because, in order to
film workers tampering with expiration dates on
meat, bleaching spoiledchickenand selling cheese
gnawed by rats, ABCs reporters committed
fraud to get themselves hired as workers. (I
FULL-COURT really miss working in agrocery store,andI love
PRESS meat wrapping, read one reporters r6sum6.)
The decision was extraordinary and chilling in the extreme,
for the followingreasons: The jury never saw the televised segment; it was instructed by the judge to assume that everything
ABC had reported was true, thus making truth irrelevant as a
defense, unlike libel cases; and compensatory damages, despite
the supermarkets extravagant claims of roughly $2billion in

losses, were found to be only $1,402. The remaining $5,498,598

were punitive damages, awarded as a measure of the jurys wrath
and contempt for the phony r6sum6s.
At a recent breakfast sponsoredby the Columbia Journalism
School in the wake of the case, high-powered journalists and
legal experts sparred over whether cclyingyy
was ever necessary.
Most agreed that a certain degree of misrepresentation is unavoidable in some instances, when the import of the story justifies it. (Even Ben Bradlee and Abe Rosenthal, who noisily
condemned the practice, agreed it would be justified to prevent
a nuclear holocaust.) First Amendment specialist Floyd Abrams,
who argued that ABCs undercover journalists had committed
a crime equivalent to jaywaIking, nevertheless tied to draw
a line by saying that journalists should never steal. When it
was pointed out that without The New YorkTimesswillingness,
at least, to act as an accessory to the stealing of the Pentagon
Papers, they would still be sitting in Daniel Ellsbergs office,
Abrams relented. No one, it seems, knows where the line is.
The problem is not that journalists lie sometimes. Its that,
unlike in the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein, the public
cannot distinguishbetween a journalistslying for the public good
and just lying. The relentless Geraldo-ization of network news
magazines has led them to use hidden cameras as an audiencegrabbing stunt rather than as a considered last resort, at the
cost of equating all journalism with that practiced by the New
York Post and The National Enquirer.
Most people dont disapprove of misrepresentation per se.
Few complainedrecently when Operation Protect Kids used deception to discover if convenience stores were selling cigarettes
to minors, for example. Its journalists they dont trust, not their
methods. A recent Gallup poll showed that only 17 percent of the
public feels newspaper reporters honesty and ethical standards
are high or very high.
Exposing the selling of unsafe meat at Food Lion is a case
ABC could have expected a jury to understand in terms of the
public stake involved. Forget it. To those empaneled, apparently,
ABCs reporters might well have been Joe Klein lying to Newsweeks readers to protect his $6 million earnings. Without better
and clearer rules to govern such behavior, every journalist will be
viewed as Joe Klein, but without the money. Investigative reporting, meanwhile, will go the way of the manual typewriter.
The Food Lion case was a focus of another recent highpowered conference, hosted in Washington by Harvards Joan
Shorenstein Center. Here, however, it was placed in the context
of a number of crises that make one wonder whether honest
journalism has any future at all. The Brookings Institutions
Stephen Hess worried about celebrificationofjournalists interfering with news coverage,noting BarbaraWalterss recent interview ofAndrew Lloyd Webber, in which she neglected to inform
viewers of her $100,000 investment in his show Sunset Boulevard. (Did Walters deliberately cover up her investment? Simply
forget? No answer is likely to inspire confidence in celebrity
journalistsability to cover their peers.) Hess bemoaned the disappearance of internationalreporting on network TV According
to recent figures, network news stories originating from foreign
bureaus declined by more than half between 1988 and 1996.