Is ‘cloning’ mad, bad and dangerous?

Abstract

The tenth anniversary of the birth of Dolly the sheep coincided with the reverberation of the South Korean cloning scandal, which exemplified how career pressures and imprecise experimental reproducibility combine to render the biomedical sciences susceptible to misconduct (Goodstein, 2002). However, the exposure of Woo Suk Hwang also demonstrated an important strength of science: its self‐correcting nature, which ensures that falsehoods—like incorrect theories—are identified and rejected. But while occasional revelations of deviant practice keep the scientific community on its toes and help to maintain quality standards, they also provide opportunities for media sensationalism, with negative effects on the public's perception of science. How can we allay the public's increased wariness of nuclear transfer between human cells? One way might be to take more care with our terminology, particularly the word ‘cloning’. As a moniker for genetic copying—borrowed from the capacity of plants for vegetative reproduction—cloning has become synonymous with nuclear transfer, a technology that was developed over 50 years ago in …