Globe Continues One-Sided Reporting of Cloning

Media Watch
Globe Continues One-Sided Reporting of Cloning

Fails to Report Derision of ACT by Scientists

January 2002

The Boston Globe has failed to report to its readers that many scientists are questioning the importance of the announcement about a cloned embryo by Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester.

It hasn’t told its readers that a stem-cell pioneer at Johns Hopkins, Dr. John Gearhart, has quit his role as an editorial adviser at the e-biomed website which brought the recent work of the Worcester company to national attention.

The story which reported the derision of the scientists was in Newsday on Long Island.

Dr. Gearhart said the study should be considered a failure and that it should not have been published. He told the BBC that he couldn’t find out who reviewed the study for e-biomed.

Dr. Donald Kennedy, editor of the peer-reviewed journal Science and president emeritus at Stanford University agreed. “It’s a failed experiment. Everything I have learned about this paper suggests that it is not an advance that would interest us. This scientific effort did not succeed by any measure. I can’t imagine how that paper did well on peer review.”

Dr. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, stated his position in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The study, he wrote, “showed little experimental progress and advanced no new ideas.”

Varmus, now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, answered the question why the company’s announcement was published not only in the online magazine but also on the same day in Scientific American and in a large spread in U.S. News & World Report.

“Biotechnology companies are dependent on investors, and investors like publicity,” Varmus wrote.