So Much for Speaking Truth to Power

The LWM drops the ball on therapeutic cloning:

Between March 2004 and the end of 2005, South Korean veterinarian Woo-Suk Hwang rose from relative obscurity to become the world’s most famous scientist.

His rise to international renown began when he reported, in the March 12, 2004, edition of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science, to have created the first cloned human embryos and embryonic-stem-cell line. Hwang’s reputation really hit the stratosphere last May after he reported in Science that he had derived eleven patient-specific embryonic-stem-cell lines using a variant of the same procedure. In barely more than one year, Hwang had gone from relative obscurity outside of Korea to being an internationally celebrated Nobel laureate-in-waiting whose influence knew no national boundaries.

Naturally, Hwang’s “breakthrough” created a media sensation. Therapeutic cloning is no longer mere theory, stories crowed: Creating embryonic stem cells that will not be rejected by patients’ immune systems is now a realistic prospect. Hwang’s success was immediately politicized: Stories and editorials accused President Bush of permitting America to fall behind South Korea in stem-cell science by refusing to spend federal funds for therapeutic cloning research, and they proposed bounteous federal and state funding as a curative.

Then, late last month, Hwang was exposed as a charlatan. He had manufactured no patient-specific cloned embryonic-stem-cell lines in 2005. His “proof” of having done so had been manipulated and forged. His 2004 paper also came under suspicion after it was discovered that the purported photograph of the first cloned stem-cell line was actually of a natural stem cell line, apparently plagiarized from an earlier journal article. Hwang resigned from his university in disgrace and is now perhaps the world’s most infamous scientist.

But enough about Hwang. The other story here is the media’s attempt to shore up public perception of embryonic-stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning even in the midst of the implosion of its most exciting “breakthrough” and the utter discrediting of the field’s most promising star.

There are ways to report a story to ensure that its import sinks deeply into the public’s consciousness. Think of Abu Ghraib; or of President Bush’s alleged culpability for the miseries suffered by the victims of Hurricane Katrina…or of the media’s incessant touting of embryonic-stem-cell research as the most likely source of miraculous medical cures, despite the current paucity of actual scientific verification.

Not only is such intensity missing in the media’s reporting of Hwang’s great cloning fraud; the coverage isn’t nearly as robust as the original “breakthrough” stories themselves. When the scandal broke, the New York Times and other papers ran matter-of-fact reporting on their front pages. How could they not? But television did not dwell on the story, and there has been an almost complete absence of investigative edge after the story first broke. Indeed, the Hwang story has generally been reported so blandly that it seems sure not to penetrate deeply into the public’s consciousness.