12-15-2001

SCIENCE: The Language of Biotech: It's No Science

Cloned human embryos are human beings, unborn people, and the donor's
twinned sister or brother. No, they're not-they're pre-embryos, clumps of
cells prior to gastrulation, cleaved cells, ovasomes, delivery trucks,
creations, entities, biological constructs, cellular life created by
nuclear transfer. Or maybe they're activated eggs.


So goes back and forth the political fight over the language of human
cloning and stem cells taken from human embryos. All factions involved
want to imprint their own favored labels on critical ideas, and to avoid
terms they deem unfavorable.


"Maybe one of the issues is that proponents have not come up with a
good term, an appropriate term, for a group of four to six cells,"
said Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
"To keep falling back on the word `embryo' is like making lightning
strike, because ... when you hear the word `embryo,' you view a child in a
womb," said Feldbaum, whose group opposes curbs on cloning research
but supports a ban on the birth of a human clone.


Responded Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, an
environmentalist group that opposes human cloning: "They see the
polling results on cloning, and they see 90 percent of the public against
it, and so they realize if they can describe this in some other way, they
will not be regulated."


These disputes over terms will greatly affect who wins the debates, say
participants and observers. "Language is the vehicle through which we
think," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you control the
language, you control the argument, and when one side comes to control the
language, the debate effectively is ended."


Among the most fought-over terms are "embryo,"
"cloning," "scientist," "stem cell," and
"human."


Embryos produced by cloning are not true embryos, because they were
neither created by fertilization nor implanted in a woman's womb, said
Ronald Green, ethics adviser to Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in
Worcester, Mass., and a professor of religion and ethics at Dartmouth
College. ACT announced on November 25 that it had created cloned human
embryos. Green favors an alternative term, "cleaved eggs," and
he would not call them human, but "cellular human materiel." If
the word "embryo" is used, "the public sees a little baby
walking around," he said. ACT's president, Michael West, says that
cloned embryos are akin to the delivery trucks that brought lumber during
construction of the World Trade Center in New York City.


That's "magical thinking," said Douglas Johnson, legislative
director of the National Right to Life Committee. "It is totally
unscientific [to believe] the nature of something depends on the attitude
one has towards it." In these debates, "much of what passes for
science is politics," said Wesley J. Smith, the left-of-center author
of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America and a critic
of the biotech industry. Advocates of cloning "make up new language
to distort, confuse, and blur.... The fact is, they are creating distinct,
individual human life for the purpose of destroying them," Smith
said.


"Cloning" itself is much argued over. Researcher Bert
Vogelstein, in testimony before Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Arlen
Specter, R-Pa., argued on October 31 that lawmakers should avoid the
widely used term "therapeutic cloning." The reason, he said, is
that "human cloning ... has the goal of creating a human being....
that would grow into a child." Instead, he said, public officials
should use the term "somatic cell nuclear transfer" to describe
what happens when scientists use cloning to produce embryos as a source of
transplantable cells. The term "cloning" would be used only when
a cloned embryo is intended for birth, Vogelstein said. The term
"therapeutic cloning" is sometimes used to describe cloning done
for the third and-some scientists say-most important purpose: to create
embryos to be used in research.


Specter made the same appeal for a name change in a November 27 speech on
the Senate floor. "It is very important that there be a public
understanding that somatic cell nuclear transfer does not relate to
cloning, and the people who called it `therapeutic cloning' are creating a
lot of confusion, because it is not cloning at all," he said. Specter
has used the term "therapeutic cloning" often before, and he
used it several times at the October hearing.


But on December 4, Vogelstein changed the term again, this time to
"nuclear transplantation." The change is needed, he said,
because it is "both perfectly accurate and, in addition, has the
connotation of transplantation.... bone marrow transplantation, heart
transplantation, liver transplantation." ACT President West echoed
Vogelstein, saying, "The real purpose of nuclear transplantation is
to create life to save lives.... That, to me, is a much more accurate and
reasonable way to look at it." The older terminology, he said, in a
press conference after the December 4 hearing, is "scaring people
about [a] brave new world.'"


If Vogelstein is successful, his "nuclear transplantation" term
will replace "therapeutic cloning" and he will eliminate the
"reproductive" in "reproductive cloning." The term
"nuclear transfer" would remain to describe the uncontroversial,
routine technique used to clone cells, such as human skin cells, that are
not embryos.


Some in the media, such as The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg on
November 27 and NBC reporter Robert Bazell on November 25, have adopted
the birth-only definition of cloning. Bazell, for instance, said on Meet
the Press that an embryo created by cloning is not a cloned embryo,
because "a clone would be a human being that was an exact copy of
somebody else [emerging] from a woman's uterus."


But these terms have long-understood meanings in biology textbooks,
Johnson said, and "when people come along to change them for a
political propaganda purpose, the media should refuse to comply." For
Bill Saunders at the conservative, Washington-based Family Research
Council, all cloning to create human embryos is reproductive, because it
creates a living human being, albeit an embryonic, small, and insentient
human being. He also rejects the term "therapeutic cloning" on
the grounds that it is lethal, not therapeutic, for the cloned embryo, and
argues that medical advances can be achieved through the use of non-embryo
cells.


In light of such contentious debates, scientists, academics, and industry
executives "have to talk about the best way to present this,"
said Mary Ann Liebert, president of Mary Ann Liebert Inc., a biotech
publishing company. " `Embryo' is a bad word," she said, but
"nuclear transfer" won't work, because "you have people who
jump when ... they're thinking of nuclear reactors." An alternative,
she suggested, is to focus on curing disease. "President Bush has
waged a courageous war on terrorism, and I hope he will decide to lead the
war on disease and disability" by aggressively backing medical
research, Liebert said. Another broad term favored by some advocates, such
as Vogelstein, is "regenerative medicine," for methods that
would cure many diseases of old age.


There is also much confusion about the technology of stem cells and
cloning, a confusion that results in the misleading usage of terms. For
example, the debates over stem-cell research prominently feature the terms
"embryonic stem cells" and "adult stem cells." But the
10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, published in
1998, defines "embryonic" as "of or relating to an embryo
... [or] incipient, rudimentary," yet the stem cells found in embryos
are fully formed and vibrant. Also, the "adult stem cell" term,
as used by many scientists and the National Institutes of Health,
encompasses stem cells taken from aborted embryos, which can be younger
than four weeks.


Similar confusion occurred when ACT announced that it had created cloned
embryos. Many national newspapers and TV shows repeated the error made by
The Washington Post's editors, whose front-page headline on November 26
declared "First Human Embryos Are Cloned in U.S." The brief
headline-but not the accompanying story-suggested the embryos were
duplicated from other embryos. In ACT's experiment, several adults donated
their DNA to clone nine short-lived human embryos genetically identical to
themselves. Also, the headline left the impression that no other embryos
had been secretly created in other research centers-which is something
that cannot be proved or disproved.


Other disputes arise from the labels that each faction tries to give
itself and its opponents. Supporters of cloning often decry their critics
as religious, pro-life advocates, although anti-cloning coalition members
showcase the support they have gained among some left-of-center
environmentalists and advocates of abortion rights.


The supporters of cloning research frequently highlight their roles as
academic scientists and downplay their business ties. For example,
Vogelstein, who advocates the use of "nuclear transplantation"
in place of "cloning," described himself at the congressional
hearing as a professor at Johns Hopkins Oncology Center and as a
researcher at the nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Vogelstein
did not cite his commercial income from a gene-research technology called
SAGE, or Serial Analysis of Gene Expression, which has been licensed to
Genzyme Molecular Oncology of Framingham, Mass. Vogelstein also did not
cite his work as a scientific adviser for Exact Sciences Corp. of Maynard,
Mass.-whose board includes former Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla.-and for
Morphotek Inc., of Philadelphia, which is seeking to create new types of
living things.


"Most scientists, if not all scientists, in this field are
entrepreneurs," said Ruth Hubbard, a professor emerita of biology at
Harvard University and a board member of the Council for Responsible
Genetics of Cambridge, Mass., which opposes human cloning.


The researchers "have their own interests and perspectives, from what
they do for a living," said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, who attended
the December 4 hearing at which Vogelstein urged use of "nuclear
transplantation" in place of "therapeutic cloning." "I
factor it in," DeWine said.


A partial solution to these linguistic disputes, said Jamieson, is for the
media to let each faction use the term it prefers. But there can be no
final fix, no language that avoids connotations that favor one side or the
other, she said, because on all sides, "language is being deployed in
service of an ideology."


Neil Munro

National Journal