Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly. While the U.S. press largely passed on the moment, the Canadian and British media paid much heavier attention. In an op-ed at Canada's Globe & Mail, my friend Tim Caulfied, a professor of law and research director at the University of Alberta's Health Law Institute, wondered whether all the knee-jerk policy activity sparked by the event was really worth the fuss.
For example, the UN spent three years negotiating an international ban on human cloning, only to settle on an ambiguous non-binding declaration that calls on countries to prohibit all forms of human cloning that "are incompatible with human dignity." Now there's a clear, bright line policy if there ever was one!
In Canada, notes Caulfield, Dolly and the sensationalistic claims of the Raelians led to the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act, a law that bans both reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Writes Caulfield: "The fact that a cloning hoax could have such a direct impact on Canadian science policy is, in itself, an astonishing part of the Dolly legacy."
He concludes with themes often shared here at Framing Science and in some of my own research. Whether the debate is GMOs, global warming, or cloning, when an issue is debated in an overtly political context such as the Canadian Parliament, the U.S. Congress, or the UN General Assembly, there is a polarized emphasis on exaggerated benefits, risks, and claims about morality. The media feed into this, as coverage passes from specialist science correspondents to political correspondents who often favor "false balance," drama, and conflict in their reporting.
It is under these contexts that media attention usually spikes relative to the science topic, thereby drawing the attention of the mass public. Yet at these critical moments, the focus for the public is not on the science nor on a nuanced view of the ethics, but rather on the personalities, conflict, and extreme claims being made. "Cloning a human remains a bad idea" writes Caulfield. "But Dolly should remind us of the need for a healthy skepticism of both the utopian and alarmist depictions of science and research."
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With all due respect, Matthew C. Nisbet, your illustration is almost designed to evoke, in a healthy adult heterosexual male, the reply: "no, in the case of this particular super model, I'd be satisfied with conventional sexual reproduction."
Not me, mind you. Though I am a healthy adult heterosexual male,I am happily married, and already reproduced. I hazard a guess that my wife can do differential equations better than the model in the illustration. I find women who are good at advanced Math and Physics to be sexy. But out of the sexual congress and the bedchamber, and towards the chambers of Congress.
Further, "incompatible with human dignity" may not be dierectly capable of implementation as "bright line policy." I feel compelled to note that "incompatible with human dignity" and "bright line" are both terms of art; the former in Bioethics (from a Catholic perspective, as I recall) and the latter in Law generally.
So, now that the knee-jerk and circle-jerk are over, would you like to explain or initiate actual debate? Not from me, mind you. I've taught classes in the ethics of human reproductive cloning, and discussed the matter with the man most responsible for cloning Dolly. He agrees with me, by the way, that if human reproductive cloning is done (which he opposes) it will probably be in an Islamic country, where there is NO significant religious opposition.
Catholic policy leaders are dead against it, Protestants split, orthodox Jews somewhat in favor, and other communities have well-stated opinions.