Bigfoot, Yeti, Area 51, Raelian scientific human cloning ability, serious science. Which one is not like the others?
That’s easy: serious science.
The news media sent out more stories this week about a third human baby that the Raelians — a group founded by a man who believes that human life was cloned millenniums ago by aliens from the far reaches of space — claim to have produced for a Japanese couple whose 2-year-old son had died.
I was a sport about the first slew of stories during Christmas week concerning Raelian announcements of human cloning success.
After all, I thought, Christmas week is a slow news time, and covering a group whose leader sports Star Trek-like uniforms can be a fun diversion.
But this latest round of stories is too much. There, I have said it: No more Raelian stories until this group offers some kind of proof about its claims.
This business of human cloning is serious stuff. Discussions of it divide politicians, philosophers and scientists as well as average walking-around human beings.
Certainly, the tragedy of losing a child — especially to couples who are beyond normal child-bearing age or who seem unable to work through their grief — cannot be understood by those who have not had the same experience. But printing unsubstantiated claims in the scientific realm is outrageous.
When man cracked the human genome in the past decade, journalists demanded some proof. When scientists paraded Dolly, the cloned sheep, for cameras and questions, news people demanded some proof. When medical researchers announce the release of a new drug, reporters want to see the studies that led to approval. But this rash of coverage for the human cloning claims of a group that offers no proof can only be compared to one great scientific story that burned reporters and taught caution: the incredible cold-fusion announcement from two University of Utah scientists and their institution in 1989.
At the time of the news conference, reporters were offered “proof” of how the pair had managed to create a fusion reaction without temperatures reaching those of the sun. So the media wrote and aired stories about the claim. This was important stuff. If man could create cold fusion, he might be able to find a clean sort of perpetual-motion way to create energy to power anything.
But, as reports from other scientists who had tried to replicate the experiment and failed began to circulate, reporters started covering that also. Finally, the cold fusion story emerged as one of scientists who apparently had more desire than skill and some reporters who needed to learn about caution. Now, most of the scientific and medical stories you see and hear are written after those doing the experiments have been published in respected medical and scientific journals.
So why are the media continuing to cover this group of nut cakes? I wish I could give a dignified answer to that question, such as, “because this cloning thing is so controversial that the American and world public needs to know.”
Balderdash. What the public needs to know is about breakthroughs in science and medicine that can be verified.
This current round of news media coverage is more fit for The Weekly World News (that’s the supermarket tabloid where writers actually are able to make stories up from whole cloth and photographers are allowed to play with pictures as much as their computers and software will allow) than mainline newspapers and news magazines.
My personal theory on why this group is getting so much coverage: It’s that biologist’s teeth. The woman Raelian who heads Clonaid has a set of choppers that could serve as a poster for what will happen if you fail to brush and floss.
Until there is some sort of DNA proof offered, the news media should find some other freak show to cover.
