The Kevorkianization of Dolly

Since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, research involving nuclear transfer-derived cells - and intelligent debate about that research - has been plagued by a phenomenon you might call "kevorkianization." Whatever your view of physician-assisted suicide, the now-legendary convicted felon Jack Kevorkian was the last person on earth who should have been the public advocate for the procedure. Dropping off cadavers in a rusty Volkswagen van on the way to press conferences, he turned euthanasia into reality TV, extolling wisdom about the wishes and conditions of his "patients" and promoting a chain of euthanasia shops.

Kevorkian's untimely decision to make theater out of coping with suffering at the end of life resulted in the total collapse of public discussion about the national need to improve hospice care, nursing homes, and Medicare. To this day, far more attention has been focused on assisted suicide in Oregon than on the drug needs of elderly citizens.

And so it is with the manipulation and engineering of cells. In February 1997, Ian Wilmut kevorkianized nuclear transfer. First, he elected to label the most revolutionary and complex exercise of human procreative control in history as "cloning," conjuring up inaccurate images of a Xerox machine that would yield two, say, Kate Beckinsales. Worse, the first "clone" was named after Dolly Parton, the well-endowed country music singer, because the embryo was engineered in part from adult sheep mammary cells. Wilmut gave his first press conferences unprepared to face questions about why anyone would birth a mammal using nuclear transfer without first holding, at a minimum, an ethical discussion about the implications for humans and agriculture. He was clearly horrified by the subsequent misuse of the word cloning by the media, and was the first to embrace the harried explanations by bioethicists that a cloned human wouldn't be an actual copy.

But the sheep had already been labeled. The world went nuts in a mad rush to ban everything remotely related to nuclear transfer. Efforts to keep discourse civil in the wake of the naming of "clones" were made even more difficult by the parade of lunatics who wanted to make one: Remember the UFO cult, the Raelians, and physicist Richard Seed? Later, that was quieted by the steady flow of information about the agricultural and medical benefits of cloning.

Scientists such as Wilmut were leaders once it became clear how to lead. He was quick to say that human cloning would be wrong, and he and I actually coauthored an approach to regulating human cloning to help in that effort. But have other high-profile members of the scientific community learned from early mistakes with euthanasia and cloning that the wrong way to approach scientific innovation of great public import is to throw it like a pie into the face of the unprepared public? I'm not so sure.

During the unraveling of Hwang Woo Suk in South Korea, even Wilmut decided that he would seize the moment to make a very public start of making cloned human embryos, and publishing a book in which he reverses himself on his previous moral objections by embracing reproductive cloning. The timing is doubly bad for the public's perception of cloning, because Wilmut found himself fending off likely unwarranted charges that he had essentially no right to claim authorship in the key scientific paper about Dolly. The anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research crowd could not have designed a more effective PR perfect storm.

Wilmut has said that he is as disconcerted by Hwang's dishonesty, just as he was by the media's misconstrual of the word clone. But that isn't the point. Whether controversial researchers call on ethicists and others to help them think about how to frame, conduct, and report on research can make all the difference. Scientists who will be putting human neuronal cells into the brains of mice cannot for a minute believe that the public will be satisfied by the assurance that something so radical has as its sole fail-safe that scientists will look out for any signs that the mice are "acting human." Those who put cellular engineering into action in agriculture, medicine, and nanotechnology must begin with the recognition that the "embryonic stem cell research debate" has become, with gay marriage, one of the two most powerful political debates of the decade, drawing attention, money, and strategic planning away from so much amazing potential in tissue engineering. Stem cell researchers and tissue engineers who would rush to market with test tube beef or rush to clinical trials with artificial organs should take a minute to study the lessons of Dr. Death.

Glenn McGee is the director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College, where he holds the John A. Balint Endowed Chair in Medical Ethics.