Ethical issues in animal cloning

The issue of human reproductive cloning has recently received a great deal attention in public discourse. Bioethicists, policy makers, and the media have been quick to identify the key ethical issues involved in human reproductive cloning and to argue, almost unanimously, for an international ban on such attempts. Meanwhile, scientists have proceeded with extensive research agendas in the cloning of animals. Despite this research, there has been little public discussion of the ethical issues raised by animal cloning projects. Polling data show that the public is decidedly against the cloning of animals. To understand the public's reaction and fill the void of reasoned debate about the issue, we need to review the possible objections to animal cloning and assess the merits of the anti-animal cloning stance. Some objections to animal cloning (e.g., the impact of cloning on the population of unwanted animals) can be easily addressed, while others (e.g., the health of cloned animals) require more serious attention by the public and policy makers.     

On being a (modern) scientist: risks of public engagement in the UK interspecies embryo debate

In 2006, a small group of UK academic scientists made headlines when they proposed the creation of interspecies embryos – mixing human and animal genetic material. A public campaign was fought to mobilize support for the research. Drawing on interviews with the key scientists involved, this paper argues that engaging the public through communicating their ideas via the media can result in tensions between the necessity of, and inherent dangers in, scientists campaigning on controversial issues. Some scientists believed that communicating science had damaged their professional standing in the eyes of their peers, who, in turn, policed the boundaries around what they believed constituted a “good” scientist. Tensions between promoting “science” versus promotion of the “scientist”; engaging the public versus publishing peer-reviewed articles and winning grants; and building expectations versus overhyping the science reveal the difficult choices scientists in the modern world have to make over the potential gains and risks of communicating science. We conclude that although scientists' participation in public debates is often encouraged, the rewards of such engagement remain. Moreover, this participation can detrimentally affect scientists' careers.     

Language and values in the human cloning debate: a web-based survey of scientists and christian fundamentalist pastors

Over the last seven years, a major debate has arisen over whether human cloning should remain legal in the United States. Given that this may be the ‘first real global and simultaneous news story on biotechnology’ (Einsiedel et al., 2002, p. 313), nations around the world have struggled with the implications of this newly viable scientific technology, which is often also referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer. Since the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, and with increasing media attention paid to the likelihood of a successful human reproductive clone coupled with research suggesting the medical potential of therapeutic cloning in humans, members of the scientific community and Christian fundamentalist leaders have become increasingly vocal in the debate over U.S. policy decisions regarding human cloning (Wilmut, 2000). Yet despite a surfeit of public opinion polls and widespread opining in the news media on the topic of human cloning, there have been no empirical studies comparing the views of scientists and Christian fundamentalists in this debate (see Evans, 2002a for a recent study of opinion polls assessing religion and attitudes toward cloning).

In order to further investigate the values that underlie scientists' and Christian fundamentalist leader's understanding of human cloning, as well as their differential use of language in communicating about this issue, we conducted an open-ended, exploratory survey of practicing scientists in the field of molecular biology and Christian fundamentalist pastors. We then analyzed the responses from this survey using qualitative discourse analysis. While this was not necessarily a representative sample (in quantitative terms, see Gaskell & Bauer, 2000) of each of the groups and the response rate was limited, this approach was informative in identifying both commonalities between the two groups, such as a focus on ethical concerns about reproductive cloning and the use of scientific terminology, as well as significant differences including concerns over ‘playing God’ for the Christian pastors, focus on therapeutic cloning by scientists, and subtle but informative differences between the two groups in their use of scientific terminology and their interpretations of human cloning as scientific progress.     

The Medawar Lecture 1998 is science dangerous?

The idea that science is dangerous is deeply embedded in our culture, particularly in literature, yet science provides the best way of understanding the world. Science is not the same as technology. In contrast to technology, reliable scientific knowledge is value-free and has no moral or ethical value. Scientists are not responsible for the technological applications of science; the very nature of science is that it is not possible to predict what will be discovered or how these discoveries could be applied. The obligation of scientists is to make public both any social implications of their work and its technological applications. A rare case of immoral science was eugenics. The image of Frankenstein has been turned by the media into genetic pornography, but neither cloning nor stem cells or gene therapy raise new ethical issues. There are no areas of research that are so socially sensitive that research into them should be proscribed. We have to rely on the many institutions of a democratic society: parliament, a free and vigorous press, affected groups and the scientists themselves. That is why programmes for the public understanding of science are so important. Alas, we still do not know how best to do this.     

Language and values in the human cloning debate: a web-based survey of scientists and Christian fundamentalist pastors

Over the last seven years, a major debate has arisen over whether human cloning should remain legal in the United States. Given that this may be the 'first real global and simultaneous news story on biotechnology' (Einsiedel et al., 2002, p.313), nations around the world have struggled with the implications of this newly viable scientific technology, which is often also referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer. Since the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, and with increasing media attention paid to the likelihood of a successful human reproductive clone coupled with research suggesting the medical potential of therapeutic cloning in humans, members of the scientific community and Christian fundamentalist leaders have become increasingly vocal in the debate over U.S. policy decisions regarding human cloning (Wilmut, 2000). Yet despite a surfeit of public opinion polls and widespread opining in the news media on the topic of human cloning, there have been no empirical studies comparing the views of scientists and Christian fundamentalists in this debate (see Evans, 2002a for a recent study of opinion polls assessing religion and attitudes toward cloning). In order to further investigate the values that underlie scientists' and Christian fundamentalist leader's understanding of human cloning, as well as their differential use of language in communicating about this issue, we conducted an open-ended, exploratory survey of practicing scientists in the field of molecular biology and Christian fundamentalist pastors. We then analyzed the responses from this survey using qualitative discourse analysis. While this was not necessarily a representative sample (in quantitative terms, see Gaskell & Bauer, 2000) of each of the groups and the response rate was limited, this approach was informative in identifying both commonalities between the two groups, such as a focus on ethical concerns about reproductive cloning and the use of scientific terminology, as well as significant differences including concerns over 'playing God' for the Christian pastors, focus on therapeutic cloning by scientists, and subtle but informative differences between the two groups in their use of scientific terminology and their interpretations of human cloning as scientific progress.     

The Pope in Mexico: Syncretism in Public Ritual

Pope John Paul II's canonization, in 2002, of Juan Diego, the Indian to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared, was variously interpreted by sections of Mexican society as an acknowledgement of the indigenous element in Mexican Catholicism and thus a restitution of past wrongs; conversely, as a final domestication of the Indian; and as an evangelical move against a resurgent Latin American Protestantism. The canonization rites were nested within political ceremonies staged, controversially, to anoint a new presidency. This broader political message was in turn challenged in the media and on the streets. In this article, I show how a major public event can articulate the life of a complex, culturally diverse society. I identify a syncretic effect produced by the struggle for ritual control. And I take a comparative view of syncretism, drawing on Javanese ethnography to suggest common mechanisms of meaning making.     

The how and why of societal publications for citizen science projects and scientists

In the scientific community, the importance of communication to society is often underestimated. Scientists and scientific organisations often lack the skills to organise such communication effectively. The Dutch citizen science phenology network Nature’s Calendar has been successful in communicating to the general public via numerous newspaper articles, television appearances, presentations, websites and social media. We refer to these publications as societal publications. Due to active communication to mass media, we frequently reach millions of people. This communication helped us to involve thousands of volunteers in recording the timing of phenological events like the start of flowering, leaf unfolding and bird migration, but also several health-related events like hay fever symptoms and tick bites. In this paper, we analyse and present our experiences with the Nature’s Calendar project regarding societal publications. Based on this analysis, we explain the importance of societal publications for citizen science projects and scientists in general, and we show how scientists can increase the newsworthiness of scientific information and what factors and activities can increase the chances of media paying attention to this news. We show that societal publications help phenological networks by facilitating the recruitment, retention and instruction of observers. Furthermore, they stimulate the generation of new ideas and partners that lead to an increase in knowledge, awareness and behavioural change of the general public or specific stakeholders. They make projects, and scientists involved, better known to the public and increase their credibility and authority. Societal publications can catalyse the production of new publications, thereby enforcing the previous mentioned points.     

On Cloning: Advocating History of Biology in the Public Interest

Cloning – the process of creating a cell, tissue line or even a complete organism from a single cell – or the strands that led to the cloning of a mammal, Dolly, are not new. Yet the media coverage of Dolly's inception raised a range of reactions from fear or moral repulsion, to cautious optimism. The implications for controlling human reproduction were clearly in the forefront, though many issues about animals emerged as well. On topics of public interest such as cloning, historians of biology have the opportunity to make a unique contribution. Such debates are often aired as if they have no precedents, either in biology or in the ethical, moral, and social concerns arising in the public arena. The technology leading to Dolly draws on strands of research going back to the 1890s, and the cycle of public response has been repeated often in the past century. What can we learn from examining these events historically, and how can we – or should we even try – to inform public opinion? I think we should try and will outline briefly some of the ways that can work.     

Managing the boundaries between maverick cloners and mainstream scientists: the life cycle of a news event in a contested field

Abstract

In January 2004, the ‘maverick cloner’, Dr Panos Zavos called a press conference in London to announce that he had implanted a freshly cloned human embryo in the womb of an infertile woman. Reports of this press conference gained prominent coverage in the national newspapers the following day and led television bulletins that evening. This article discusses the ways in which expertise was claimed by or attributed to Dr Zavos and other key media sources. It argues that three key boundaries were demarcated in the coverage as journalists framed the stories in terms provided by Zavos's antagonists, ‘mainstream scientists’. It also discusses the engagement in tactics of news management by an organised grouping of UK scientists who attempted to shape the terrain of news coverage on the subject of cloning. The question of the extent to which interested scientists should be able to set the terms of media debate is explored.     

Cloning humans,cloning literature: genetics and the imagination deficit

Abstract

After the birth of Dolly, media stories on cloning were replete with references to well-known science fiction plots. This essay criticizes the ‘imagination deficit’ of scientists and journalists, first by problematizing the uncritical adoption of attenuated science fiction plots in the media coverage of Dolly, and second, by proposing to look at more expansive science fiction novels that carefully examine issues such as uniqueness and identity in relation to the new genetics.     

Genes in food--why the furore?

Although unprecedented and perhaps unique in its irrationality, the recent furore over genetically modified (GM) food holds extremely important lessons for scientists. Some sections of the media undoubtedly bear a heavy responsibility for giving the expression 'GM' threatening connotations that are quite unwarranted. However, influential contributions to the hysteria have come from a surprising range of other sources, including some scientists. The research community has failed in its responsibility to society in three ways. Firstly, plant scientists did not appreciate that certain techniques (such as the use of antibiotic resistance genes as markers during plant transformation) would inevitably provoke public consternation. As a result, they took no steps to address such concerns. Secondly, researchers overlooked, minimized or in some cases simply dismissed the significance of public fears that they were 'interfering with Nature' or 'playing God'. Thirdly, plant breeders apparently saw no need to take pro-active measures with regard to the media and public in placing potential environmental and nutritional benefits of GM crops on the agenda in a positive fashion. Partly because of this failure, GM food is now firmly established in the public mind as wholly objectionable. One measure of how far we have travelled down that road is that it hardly matters any more whether objections are based on alleged environmental risks of cultivating GM crops or alleged toxicological hazards of eating them. 'Genetically modified organism', like 'radioactivity', has become an odious, generic shibboleth. Given that millions of people throughout the world are already benefiting from pharmaceuticals made by GM organisms, this is bizarre.     

Scientific Independence and Credibility in Sociopolitical Processes

Abstract: Absence of scientific independence can be associated with a lack of impartiality and therefore with a lack of credibility. Yet scientific credibility is essential for effective participation in sociopolitical processes—processes that necessarily involve politics and often result in decisions about land management, conservation, and public policy. All scientists are aware of these processes, many wish to participate, and some wish to advocate for their personal policy preferences. However, scientists who lack impartiality often create the perception of bias, and they can suffer a concomitant loss of credibility. Some policy-makers also have personal preferences for certain policies, and the term normative policies can be used here even though all policies can be viewed as normative in the sense that they involve multiple inputs. Hence, the idea that scientists must provide unbiased information for unbiased application by policy-makers is sometimes wrong. For scientists to be effective participants in sociopolitical processes that lead to conservation policies or related actions, they should inform the public about issues while avoiding direct involvement in policy development and the political considerations this necessarily entails. Scientists should only participate in the decision-making process with impartial information and in their proper role as objective scientists.     

Cloning humans, cloning literature: genetics and the imagination deficit

After the birth of Dolly, media stories on cloning were replete with references to well-known science fiction plots. This essay criticizes the 'imagination deficit' of scientists and journalists, first by problematizing the uncritical adoption of attentuated science fiction plots in the media coverage of Dolly, and second, by proposing to look at more expansive science fiction novels that carefully examine issues such as uniqueness and identity in relation to the new genetics.     

The monarch butterfly controversy: scientific interpretations of a phenomenon

The future development and use of agricultural biotechnology has been challenged by two preliminary studies indicating potential risk to monarch butterfly populations by pollen from corn engineered to express proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis. Likewise, these studies have also challenged the way in which science should be performed, published in scientific journals and communicated to the public at large. Herein, we provide a history of the monarch controversy to date. We believe a retrospective view may be useful for providing insights into the proper roles and responsibilities of scientists, the media and public agencies and the consequences when they go awry.     

How is Scientific Credibility Affected by Communicating Uncertainty? The Case of Endocrine Disrupter Effects on Male Fertility

Using the case of endocrine disrupter effects on male fertility, we explored how communicating uncertainty influences the credibility of the information that laypeople receive from scientists and how laypeople form judgments about the relationship between uncertainty and credibility. We found that laypeople assess the credibility of scientific information—whether or not it is accompanied by uncertainty—by referencing their “science model” and using non-scientific references (i.e., situations encountered in one's daily life, information received from other sources, one's own observations of the world, and one's education or professional experience). Scientific credibility is a mixture of (sometimes contradictory) considerations along these different axes. Previous studies have found that some scientists assume that communicating uncertainty will lower public credibility of science. Our results contradict this assumption for situations in which academic scientists communicate uncertainty, which is perceived as additional knowledge bringing a new perspective on certain information. People expect scientists to provide practical solutions and feel disillusionment when scientists lack straight answers. However, they accepted uncertainty as an intrinsic characteristic of science and a consequence of the limits to human beings’ capacity to understand the world. Further, the low credibility of industry scientists is further reinforced when they communicate uncertainty.     

Cloning: new breakthroughs leading to commercial opportunities

Research on cloning animals, again, came to the forefront of public attention in 1997. Most scientists involved in biomedical and agricultural research have emphasized the benefits, of which there are many, of cloning to the public. Basic studies on nuclear transfer have and will continue to contribute to our understanding of how genomic activation and cell cycle synchrony affect nuclear reprogramming and cloning efficiencies, specifically. Also, more basic information on actual mechanisms and specific factors in the oocyte causing nuclear reprogramming is forthcoming. As new molecular approaches in functional genomics are combined with nuclear transfer experiments, new genes involved in nuclear reprogramming will be found. The commercial potentials of products stemming from discoveries in cloning are vast. Cloning will be a more efficient, faster and more useful way of making transgenic fetuses for cell therapies, adult animals for protein production and organs for xenotransplantation. Clearly there are new opportunities in animal cloning technology that will produce many benefits to society.     

The Opinion Editorial: teaching physiology outside the box

Improving the public understanding of science is an important challenge for the future professional scientists who are our current undergraduates. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that explores the role of mass media as community gatekeepers of new scientific findings. This model frames the benefits for undergraduate science students to learn about media genres so that they can learn to communicate science more effectively to nonprofessional audiences. Informed by this Media Role model, we then detail a novel writing task for undergraduate physiology students, the Opinion Editorial (Op-Ed), and an accompanying Peer Review. The Op-Ed genre was directly taught to the students by a professional journalist. As an assessment task, students presented a recent, highly technical paper as an Op-Ed. This was assessed by both faculty members and peers using a detailed assessment rubric. Most students were able to replicate the features of Op-Eds and attained high grades on their writing tasks. Survey data from final-year physiology students (n = 230) were collected before and after the implementation of the Op-Ed/Peer Review. These indicated that most students were aware of the importance of scientists to effectively communicate their knowledge to nonprofessional audiences, that the Op-Ed writing task was challenging, and that they believed that their ability to write to nonprofessional audiences was improved after explicit teaching and feedback.     

Interacting and paradoxical forces in neuroscience and society

Discoveries in the field of neuroscience are a natural source of discourse among scientists and have long been disseminated to the public. Historically, as news of findings has travelled between communities, it has elicited both expected and unusual reactions. What scientific landmarks promote discourse within the professional community? Do the same findings achieve a place in the public eye? How does the media choose what is newsworthy, and why does the public react the way it does? Drawing on examples of past challenges at the crossroads of neuroscience and society and on a case study of trends in one neurogenetic disease, autism, we explore the dialectical forces interacting in scientific and public discourse.     

Reproductive biotechnology and "big" biological questions

In recent decades, scientists have learned to manipulate that cardinal characteristic of life, reproduction, with powerful techniques like artificial insemination, contraception, embryo transfer, cryopreservation, and cloning by nuclear transfer. While these technologies often are used for practical applications and basic research, they have another profound intrinsic quality, which is to engender deep-seated thinking about important biological questions. Examples that stimulate such thinking include a goat's giving birth to her identical twin sister via splitting embryos, cryopreservation, and embryo transfer; that a parthenogenetic embryo can never become an animal but can become a genetic mother via an aggregation chimera; or that a somatic cell can become the sole genetic parent of a calf via cloning. In this paper, I illustrate this thought-stimulating quality by considering contributions of reproductive technologies to understanding, if not completely answering, several important biological questions.     

Mama Grizzly and the polar bears

Mis-reporting of the science behind climate change has called into question the judgement and integrity of scientists. Howy argues that better communication between scientists and journalists is needed, to restore public confidence in both.EMBO reports (2012) 13, 471; doi:10.1038/embor.2012.56A recent paper on the matrilineal population history of two sister species, Ursus maritimus (polar bears) and Ursus arctos (brown bears), based on mtDNA sequence analysis, reveals a comparatively recent introgression. The authors propose that it represents a signature of environmental stress in marginal habitats [1]. In a nutshell, it means that all modern polar bears probably belong to a maternal lineage that arose by opportunistic mating with a female from a line of brown bears from Ireland that later became extinct.In the same week that the paper was published, I was staying in an enchanting B&B overlooking spectacular Kachemak Bay in southern Alaska. One sunlit evening, my hostess joined me and some other guests on the terrace of her hillside home to sample some of the excellent local microbrew and discuss issues of concern to Alaskans and the wider world. Gazing at the incredible panorama of glaciers, mountains and volcanic islets, the subject turned, perhaps inevitably, to polar bears and climate change.Our hostess was insistent that the notion of global climate change endangering arctic wildlife was nonsense. Polar bears were not endangered at all, she asserted; in fact, there might already be too many of them. She went on to complain about how the bears have been shamelessly exploited by the ‘climate-lobby'': a huge conspiracy run by Al Gore to make millions, damaging the Alaskan oil industry in the process.As her guest, I shrugged politely and changed the subject: a mitochondrial geneticist clearly can''t compete with whatever talk-radio show was her preferred source of information on the topic. Earlier on the trip I had already been subjected to a tirade against ‘Frankenfish'' by another B&B owner, who seemed to want to make quite sure, before renting me a room, that I wasn''t visiting her northern paradise in order to sabotage the gene pool of the local salmon.Later, back in the safety of academia, I decided to check my facts. It is perfectly true that polar bears are not classed as an endangered species, although their image is widely used by the media as an emblem of the risks to Nature created by humans; in particular by our activities that contribute to global climate change. Technically, they are classified at present only as a ‘threatened'' species. Recent modelling suggests that their habitat range could be significantly protected by even comparatively modest restrictions on future greenhouse gas emissions [2].Notwithstanding the fate of U. maritimus, a crucial gap remains between scientific data, public perceptions and whatever actual changes in policy need to be implemented. The oil industry and its political allies are quick to seize on any findings that point to uncertainties in prediction models, or that indicate unexpected robustness in the response of biological systems to environmental stress. The polar bear introgression paper is a case in point. By tracing the species back to a single female, the authors provide evidence of a rare event that might have saved the ancestral species from an earlier climactic crisis that threatened its survival. But this has no predictive value as to the likelihood of a comparable rare event or combination of rare events in the future that might save the bear or any other threatened species from depredations of the environment. Rather, it illustrates the vulnerability of highly specialized species to superficially innocuous or gradual changes in the natural geography of their habitat.Science is not conducted in order to support one side or another in a political argument. Nor is it even conducted to ‘prove'' a specific scientific hypothesis. It certainly does not deal in certainties. It extrapolates the most reasonable interpretation of data, and offers predictions based on this interpretation. New data can always force us to adopt a different interpretation. Experts can also disagree, about both interpretations and predictions. The media have a duty to explain this principle and report scientific findings accordingly. Where this is not the case, scientists become exposed to unwarranted challenges that question not only their expertise but also their integrity. The science associated with climate change is just one example, although clearly one of the most emotive.In the end, this all boils down to the continuing need for a better, more symbiotic and also more transparent relationship between scientists and the media. Scientists should be better trained to communicate with the public, while journalists should be better trained in basic science and in the principles of scientific method. Scientists and journalists both aspire to high ethical principles, although they do not always appear to be fully honoured in practice. However, the main reason for these lapses is not malice or corruption, but simple miscommunication. Journalists who seem to be representing vested interests or fanning the flames of sensationalism are often simply unaware of, or cannot grasp, the arguments of substance buried in research literature and in the ways it is used. Conversely, scientists who, for very sound reasons, genuinely favour one interpretation of their data over others, can find themselves unjustly accused of fraud and manipulation in the popular press.We have a clear duty to explain ourselves to the world, as well as to challenge erroneous presentations or interpretations of scientific data that appear in the public domain. Perhaps I should have been a little less reticent about engaging my Alaskan hostess on such matters. The Alaskan wilderness is magnificent in its icy desolation: on that, and on the need that it should be there for future generations to appreciate, there would be no disagreement.