Doctor who? Scientists are treated as objective arbiters in the cloning debate. But most have serious skin in the game.

• Author: Munro, Neil

THERE'S HARDLY AN ISSUE MORE difficult to untangle--or more important to the future of science and medicine--than that of human cloning and stem cells. But for reporters charged with covering the debate, sorting out the questions involved is as difficult as explaining the science behind them.

There's one argument over whether the government should ban researchers from using embryos that are going to get thrown away at fertility clinics, on the claim that they are human lives even if they're going to be destroyed anyway. There's another, slightly different argument, over whether scientists should be allowed to clone adult cells to produce embryos, from which scientists can then extract embryonic stem cells--cells which could, in theory, be transplanted back into the original adult patient for different forms of therapy. There's still another dispute over whether adult stem cells are even viable alternatives in the event that use of embryonic stem cells is outlawed.

When covering these debates, reporters often try to use university scientists as objective arbiters. Politicians and interest groups may be motivated by ideology, but the scientists--they presume--are sticking to the facts. But the funny thing is, scientists don't necessarily agree about the facts. For instance, David Prentice, a biologist at Indiana State University, has been quoted in dozens of newspaper articles as an advocate for the position that you can limit the use of embryonic stem cells without hurting scientific research. And then there's somebody like Irving Weisman, a Stanford scientist and past chair of a prestigious panel on cloning at the National Academy of Sciences, who's been quoted in over 160 newspaper articles in recent years defending the opposite position--that embryonic stem cells are essential to future advances in medical science and technology.

Part of the explanation, of course, is simply an honest difference of opinion among scientists grappling with difficult emerging questions. But there's a deeper problem at work which journalists overwhelmingly ignore: These supposedly objective scientists have business interests that overlap with their scientific views. For instance, Prentice specializes in studying stem cells taken from adults, not embryos, and has sought a federal grant from the National Institutes of Health for his work; federal curbs on embryo research would "obviously" free more funds for his approach, he says, and if his research pans out, Prentice will market the resulting procedures via a biotech company--a company which would have better prospects were embryo-cell cloning outlawed by the government. By the same token, Weissman has already made millions of dollars through three companies he's founded--Systemix Inc., Celltrans Inc., and StemCells Inc., the last two of which he still helps manage--which use stem-cell technology. When President Bush announced last August that he would give narrow support to such technology, the market value of the StemCells Inc. briefly shot up by 45 percent.

But these two scientists aren't the problem. Both Weissman and Prentice are entirely candid regarding their financial and business interest in the debate over cloning. Rather, the problem lies with the press, which almost never informs its readers that these supposedly disinterested scientists have great financial stakes in the debate. Prentice is invariably cited as an "Indiana State University biologist"; Weissman nearly always as "a professor at Stanford." And the same goes for dozens of other scientists who mix business and academia, substantially affecting the cloning debate in America and even abroad.

The Doctor Is In

Today, many...