CLONING, HYPE, AND THE DEATH OF ETHICS

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

The formula for the triumph of biotechnology seems to be set: medical hype plus dishonest language equals a compliant populace and profits beyond measure. As President Bush’s new bioethics advisory council starts work under the wise Leon Kass this month [on January 17?] they are unlikely to be taken in. But when the Senate finally gets to vote on human cloning in February or March, it is anybody’s guess. Yet the biotech industry is leaving very little to chance.

For cloning, which seemed so recently to be the Waterloo of uncontrolled biotech, is set perhaps to become its Gettysburg.

Advanced Cell Technology is of course the case in point. Facing evidence that 84% of the population opposes human cloning for medical experimentation, they have launched a PR blitz that cleverly combines science, ethics and Capitol Hill to roll back public opinion, frustrate public policy, and secure their bottom line.

Look at the events of the nine days that started with the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We watched a brilliant public relations plan unfolding.

First, they announce the experimental human cloning, meticulously orchestrated with a cover piece in a news magazine, the Sunday TV shows, timed for simultaneous publication in professional journals - with a slick combination of planning and secrecy.

Second, they ensure that ethics is on their side. How does one do that? Well, one hires ethicists. The New York Times recently reported that one “ethics committee” chair was paid in one year over $100,000. Perhaps some serve pro bono. Either way, an “ethics committee” is convened and reports that it has completed its due diligence and signed off on the venture. At the follow-up Senate hearing on December 4, Ronald M. Green, the “ethics committee” chair, compared himself with a military adviser – denying cloning to ACT would be like denying jet planes to the military, declared “ethicist” Green. Of course “ethics” will only serve its PR role until the public finally realizes what is going on – that the ethicist has ceased to be an impartial judge, and has become an advocate. But by then the damage may well all have been done.

Thirdly, to aid the ethical/PR endeavor, fresh language has been coined to offer maximum cover for the exercise - for example, a clonal embryo is now, we are told, merely an “activated egg;” “cellular life;” the cloned human embryo (announced as such in every news medium and science journal) really is not a cloned human embryo at all – it is “a novel form of human life” (Green’s Senate testimony), “similar to but not the same as a normal human embryo.” Bert Vogelstein, another witness, offered us a further helpful sanitized term – “nuclear transplantation.” Newspeak, it seems, is central to the biotech revolution.

Fourth, add the key ingredient – the hype. “Gale-force hype,” as even embryonic stemcell experiment supporter Charles Krauthammer has memorably coined it. But there is no hype like the hype of Michael West, founder-president of ACT and promoter-in-chief of uncontrolled biotechnology. He began his Senate testimony by reeling off a list of all the diseases to which stemcells cultured from clonal embryos would hold the cure – Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes . . . . And not content to throw around these freighted names, he made his case against even a moratorium on his own particular means of culling stemcells: if it were held up for six months, 3,000 deaths a day would result – and he gave us the total, 547,500, with the plain implication that their blood would be on our head if the Senate opted for a moratorium on cloning while we worked out what to do next. Shortly after, even Arthur Caplan, usually in the vanguard of pro-biotech ethics, agreed with me on Fox News that a six-month moratorium was a good idea; and agreed with the anchor that Mike West’s “547,500 death” claim was, shall we say, egregious (the term they actually used was b***-s***).

The roll-out has certainly been slick. The Thanksgiving announcement was scheduled to be followed two days later by consideration in the House of Representatives of a “sense of the House” motion that heaped entirely uncritical praise on biotechnology and its industry – intended to gain the support of the same House that in July voted 267-162 to ban exactly what ACT had achieved.

And now the Senate Appropriations hearing, which featured just five witnesses: Senator Brownback, whose bill would comprehensively ban cloning; and, arrayed against him, Michael West; Ronald Green, his ethical “advisor;” and two other cloning advocates.

Without doubt, Advanced Cell Technology, and its backers the trade group BIO (the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which neatly followed up the ACT announcement by re-naming their chief lobbyist Vice-President of Bioethics), deserve our admiration. Never before have public relations, ethics, language, technology, the legislature and the calendar been so carefully orchestrated in the interests of private profit, and to the detriment of the public good.

The challenge is plain. Behind the 84% of Americans who want to ban cloning lies a broad coalition - all the way from environmentalists like Friends of the Earth, women’s advocacy leaders, and mainline religion like the United Methodists to pro-life groups and Catholic and evangelical Christians on the “right.” Their task is plain, but it is getting harder by the day as ethics is co-opted and language coined to soft-sell the intentions of for-profit biotech. Human dignity is in the balance, and that age-old principle that wonderful ends do not, cannot, never, ever, justify unethical means. If as a nation we cannot learn that lesson on cloning, it is hard to see how we shall have the maturity and the judgment to manage the unfolding biotech agenda of which this is merely an early sample.

That’s why Bill Kristol, Bill Bennett, James Dobson, Chuck Colson and I together with others have written to congratulate the President on his clear commitment to ethical biotech, and to encourage him to keep this at the top of his policy agenda as he prepares his State of the Union and continues to lead as the conscience of the nation. There’s more than one war going on. If we are going to triumph in the battle for human dignity, we have to win them both.