USA Today is reporting that the South Korean Government may have known Hwang’s science was fraudulent but boosted it anyway. Here’s another aspect of the cloning controversy in a nutshell; the stampede effect to get government boosting this research with bountiful grants of the public’s funds to the point that hysteria, rather than the actual state of the science, seems to become the primary factor in decision making.
And here’s a key quote that implicates the media’s continued malpractice in fully reporting the story and its desire in the midst of this fiasco to still tout cloning as the primary hope for sick patients: “Richard Arvedon of Hartford, Conn., says his 8-year-old daughter, Emma, has had type 1 diabetes since she was 13 months old. She actually met Hwang at a United Nations conference on stem cell research several years ago.
“The family hoped that his research would help provide the breakthroughs that might one day cure Emma.
“Since 1999, Arvedon has volunteered with the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research to help foster U.S. stem cell research. He says he’s disheartened by the news from South Korea, but adds, ‘We know we have all these reputable scientists, all these wonderful people, working on this. We knew somebody’s going to do it. Maybe Hwang hasn’t, but we know somebody’s going to.’”
See, here’s the thing: At that point the reporter could have written that Type 1 diabetes has been cured in mice using adult stem cells from the spleen and that the experiment is approved for human trials. But the media still can’t—or won’t— see the forest for the trees.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
