The Media Have No Clue

When it comes to science, the media are absolutely clueless. The reporting today on Obama's decision to allow stem cell research using discarded human embryos is the latest proof. They have never reported the facts properly, but it just gets worse. Can't they even do basic Internet research?

1. Since the beginning, they have reported that the Bush administration had forbidden the use of federal funds to do stem cell research. That was and remains false. Federal funds may not be used for research involving the sacrifice of human embryos - except for a set available as of August, 2001. As I recall, there were about a 21 lines that can be used. So that's two mistakes; federal funds can be used for stem cell research as long as it doesn't involve the destruction of new embryos and nothing in the executive order stops others from funding embryonic stem cell research. The States of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York have done do for several years as have some private philanthropies.

2. Embryonic stem cells are not the best solution for use in patients because they are essentially foreign bodies; there is a potential for the patient's rejection mechanisms to produce damaging antibodies. As a result, in September of 2005, researchers at Harvard produced stem cells from skin cells using the existing pool of embryonic cells as a "catalyst." That research was probably federally funded. It was barely reported while the media ranted and raved over "the ban."

3. Last Fall, researchers at Harvard again found a way to create stem cells from skin, this time adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA. It was confirmed that no DNA damage was induced, but researchers continued seeking a way to do the job without using viruses. The media either ignored or misreported the discovery by emphasizing the "danger" of using a virus.

4. Last week, Canadian researchers published a paper in Nature reporting they had created stem cells from the skin of a mouse without using adenoviruses. Before long, there will be no need to destroy human embryos because a better method is being developed. Not one word about this breakthrough was on any news report that I saw this evening. Instead, they all fawned over "Obama reversing the Bush ban." Even that was not true!

5. What Obama really did was give instructions to NIH to come up, within 90 days, with a set of ethical guidelines for using embryonic stem cells in federally-sponsored research. This is not a trivial difference. Presumably, NIH knows that the whole controversy is about to become moot; there will soon be no need for destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells. Under the circumstances, I expect there to be some severe restrictions placed on their use and perhaps some sunset provisions. Whatever NIH decides, the president will have to take additional action to approve the new guidelines and allow existing federal funding, if any, to be used under those guidelines. Ultimately, nothing really changes unless Congress funds more research.

Meanwhile, the clueless media publishes sound bites from equally misleading researchers who are thrilled for a chance to suck the federal teet. One had the audacity to say that this took Bush politics out of science. Wrong. Bush didn't inject politics into the situation, he inserted ethical guidelines based, in part, on religious principles. It's the media and some supporters of embryonic stem cell research who injected politics into the situation.

The message: when you hear the media reporting on science, you can believe they got it wrong. Ignore them, or do your own research on the Internet.

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March 14th. Flip-flop already. The omnibus spending bill signed by Obama this week included the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. That amendment bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death." So much for the political grandstanding of reversing the Bush Executive Order banning funding of embryonic stem cell research - at least until the next spending bill is passed. But that amendment is a measure Congress has included in spending bills in every fiscal year since 1996. And even if it's not included some day, good luck getting Congress to fund stem cell research without it.

It's far from clear whether the Dickey-Wicker Amendment only applies to research in which the embryos are destroyed; some contend that it does not apply to stem cells created since 2001 by other researchers. But, once again, good luck getting funds appropriated.

Also this week, Obama said the stem cell policy is designed so that it "never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. Such cloning," he said, "is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society or any society." Now that's a weird statement! Use of human embryos in stem cell research almost always involves cloning. The alternative is to use a new embryo for every experiment. So is Obama making a distinction between "human reproduction," meaning taking clones to full-term and birth as opposed to cloning embryos, growing them for a while, and destroying them for stem cell research? You have to wonder if Obama knows what he just said.

Politicians are so devious that you need a score card to keep track. Don't count on the media to give you the full story. Meanwhile, (surprise!), the New York Times editors are pushing for repeal of Dickey-Wicker while Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a writer for the New York Times, discusses the impossibility of "removing politics from science."