Managing the boundaries between maverick cloners and mainstream scientists: the life cycle of a news event in a contested field

Abstract

In January 2004, the ‘maverick cloner’, Dr Panos Zavos called a press conference in London to announce that he had implanted a freshly cloned human embryo in the womb of an infertile woman. Reports of this press conference gained prominent coverage in the national newspapers the following day and led television bulletins that evening. This article discusses the ways in which expertise was claimed by or attributed to Dr Zavos and other key media sources. It argues that three key boundaries were demarcated in the coverage as journalists framed the stories in terms provided by Zavos's antagonists, ‘mainstream scientists’. It also discusses the engagement in tactics of news management by an organised grouping of UK scientists who attempted to shape the terrain of news coverage on the subject of cloning. The question of the extent to which interested scientists should be able to set the terms of media debate is explored.

Background

In January 2004, UK audiences were treated to sensational headlines like, ‘A fertility expert claims he's implanted the first cloned human embryo’ and ‘Fury at maverick scientist's claim to have cloned a human being’, as Dr Panos Zavos achieved virtually blanket coverage in the national news media for his claims for this scientific first. In response to the high profile this new event attracted, a number of prominent British scientists issued an open letter to the media, via the Science Media Centre, appealing to journalists and editors to reconsider the prominence they give to such stories, announced without ‘a shred of evidence to substantiate their assertions’. This open letter achieved additional coverage for those sources quoted in opposition to Zavos's earlier claims, and raised issues about the appropriate roles for, and relationships between, the media and scientists.

Press coverage on the issue of human cloning has been a recurrent feature in the UK since February 1997, subsequent to the announcement that scientists had cloned a sheep using a somatic (differentiated) cell with cell nuclear replacement technology. As Alan Petersen noted: ‘Dolly proved highly ‘newsworthy’, receiving not only a great deal of news media coverage in many countries in February and March 1997, but continuing to provide the point of reference for many subsequent media reports about cloning' (Peterson, 2002).

The announcement of Dolly's birth seems to have caught the scientific and bioethicist communities on the hop, resulting in global disarray on ethical and legal responses to the possibilities the development appeared to open up for the cloning of other mammals, humans in particular. It is perhaps, in part, this post hoc response that has led to the attention focused on the periodic media events related to human cloning. Stories about the actual or imminent creation of the ‘first human clone’ have run in London-based UK national newspapers in at least four months of each year since 1997. The only exceptional year was 2000 when stories ran in just two months. The year 2001 more than made up for this dip in coverage, however, with stories running in the national press in nine out of 12 months. A short list of ‘mavericks’ accounts for an enormous proportion of this coverage with Dr Richard Seed, Dr Severino Antinori, Dr Panos Zavos and the Raelians/Clonaid making multiple appearances, in several cases duplicating claims they had already made. This paper will look at the coverage of one of the more recent events, the claim by Dr Panos Zavos, at a well-attended press conference in January 2004, that he had implanted a cloned embryo in the wife of a man who was unable to produce sperm.

In their discussion of the cloning debate in 2001, Nehrlich and Clarke suggested that at such media events: ‘so-called ‘maverick’ scientists can play a distinctive and influential role that is quite different from their orthodox colleagues’ (Nerlich & Clarke, 2003). In fact they argue that in spite of increasing fears about the ethical, legal and medical risks associated with human (reproductive) cloning, the positive effect of media events staged by maverick scientists is an increased attention being given to legal and ethical questions that need to be debated until plausible answers are found. Given this argument, the fact that journalists chose to cover what they unanimously reported as dubious claims in January 2004 suggests that they may share similar concerns that key ethical and legal questions are aired. However, the response of scientists not constructed as maverick to this latest intervention into the public debate on human cloning by Dr Zavos appears to run counter to this investment in open debate.

Introduction

On 18 January 2004, the US-based, Cypriot-born, Dr Panos Zavos—variously described as a ‘fertility maverick’, ‘a maverick and egotistical doctor’ and, of course, ‘Dr Frankenstein’ (Huxford, 2000; Turney, 1998) held a press conference in Central London at which he claimed he had produced a cloned embryo, through fusing skin cells from an infertile man with an enucleated egg taken from his wife, and then implanted it in the woman. He said that this had happened so recently that it was as yet too early to tell whether a pregnancy would result, but suggested that the likelihood of pregnancy was about 30%. Dr Zavos refused to name the patient, to say where the procedure had taken place—although he did say it was not in the UK, the US or Europe (where human reproductive cloning is prohibited)—or to provide supporting evidence of any kind. He simply suggested that the attendant media and other interested parties, including the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and the Secretary of State for Health, should take his word that the event had taken place. If and when a pregnancy resulted he suggested that he had plans to publicise that event, too.

The brief account above encapsulates the news story as it was edited in the national press and broadcast on Channel 4, BBC1 and ITV. However, the live streaming of the press conference from SkyNews reveals a more extensive context than was reported on. Before he announced the implantation of the cloned embryo—his presentation slide asserted that it was a freshly cloned embryo, as opposed to the frozen cloned embryo for which he had earlier sought a surrogate mother—he spent about ten minutes of the conference announcing that his clinic in Lexington, Kentucky was about to begin work with embryo splitting. As part of his presentation, he argued that such activity needed to be performed in an appropriate regulatory climate and he stated his desire to work within the law. However, he also argued for extending the clinical opportunities available to patients with infertility as consistent with the US's pursuit of frontiers in the space programme.

As part of their reporting of this news event broadcast and press journalists sought commentary from key sources, including the Health Secretary and the HFEA. The HFEA and the Science Media Centre, indeed, had already pre-emptively prepared news releases critiquing the announcement that Zavos was expected to make. However, the UK science community took this rebuttal one stage further by issuing a press release and an open letter to the media, embargoed until 00.01 hours GMT Wednesday, 21 January. The press release bemoaned the ease with which Zavos had gained media coverage and argued that journalists should be wary of thus giving a false impression of scientific research. A brief extract from the press release gives a sample of its approach:

Professor Chris Higgins, Director MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College London and one of the signatories to the letter said: ‘This is not a condemnation or an attack on the media—it is an appeal born out of a widespread frustration at the ease with which these publicity seeking scientists appear to grab the headlines. While journalists did their best to challenge these scientists about why they choose to go public before submitting their work to the scrutiny of scientists in the usual way, the very fact that the story achieved such prominence will have suggested that this is mainstream work’.

The press release goes on to say that the letter's signatories, of whom Higgins is one, ‘claim that within journalism there is a culture of respect for evidence to which they are appealing’. In fact, this claim can be well substantiated simply by viewing or reading the initial coverage of Zavos's announcement towards which journalists took a very sceptical tone, so it appears that there is some rhetorical overbidding going on in this approach to the media, which I will unpack below.

Method

My analysis is based on a comprehensive archive of all UK national press reporting between 1 January 2004 and 30 June 2004. The archive was collected for an ESRC-funded CESAGen flagship project looking at discourses around genomics in the media. The project is focused on human genomics, rather than plant or (non-human) animal genomics. Articles were cut that referred to human genes, human genetics and human genomics. This includes the prototypical ‘gene for’ stories, as well as company news on biotechnology companies working in the human genomics field. Because of the intersections of genomics with stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, cuttings were also gathered on stem cells and cloning. Human reproductive cloning stories were included due to the hypothesis that distinctions between reproductive and therapeutic cloning are regarded as problematic in many quarters. This has indeed proven to be the case in the course of 2004, as first the announcement of the Korean breakthrough in February, and then the award in August to the Newcastle Centre for Life of an HFEA license to work on therapeutic cloning called forth speculations about reproductive cloning, despite the respective scientists' insistence that their work was therapeutic cloning and their repudiation of reproductive cloning. However, in January, these two significant announcements were still to come. The scale of coverage that this maverick scientist attracted prefigured the degree of attention the therapeutic cloning stories would garner, as well as drawing on an already established appetite for cloning-related stories. In addition to one short news piece in The Independent on Friday, 16 January 2004, which referred to Zavos's forthcoming press conference, the initial announcement about the implantation of the cloned embryo resulted in seventeen prominently featured news stories across the London-based broadsheets and tabloids. The open letter and associated comment pieces resulted in the publication of another seven stories, this time restricted to the quality press. Finally, when Zavos announced that no pregnancy had resulted from the claimed implantation, just four newspapers covered the story; The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror and The Times. My analysis of the television news coverage focuses on three main bulletins on Saturday, 17 January. These were the ITV Weekend News at (insert time), the Channel 4 evening news and the BBC1 News at 10:40 pm. The ITN news coverage of the event was packaged virtually identically for both ITV1 and Channel 5, so there was no need to analyse them separately. I also viewed video of the live streaming of the press conference from Sky News although, disappointingly, the live feed ended before the crucial announcement about the implantation of the cloned embryo was made.

The cuttings on the press conference and the subsequent truncated controversy, as well as the TV news bulletins, were coded for headlines, byline, word count, use of image(s), and sources quoted, cited or implied. They were also coded for key themes such as references to ‘mavericks’, ‘cowboy cloners’ or mention of peer review (journals/conferences), references to risk and legality. Textual discourse was carefully attended to, particularly with regards to judgements, both rational and emotional, to key metaphors, and to analogies drawn with other media events or scientific/medical breakthroughs. Visual images utilised were also compared and analysed.

Publicity seeking and sensational copy

It is tempting to dismiss this staged event as the self-aggrandising gesture of a publicity seeker who was savvy enough to stage his event during a slow news period, and just ahead of the annual conference for the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, thus providing journalists with sensational space-filling copy. This temptation may be particularly strong when we note that minimal attention was given to the subsequent announcement that the cloning had failed, despite the initial claim hitting the front pages and leading the television news bulletins. However, the extent of the interest that Zavos raised—and continues to raise—in journalists and other key opinion-formers suggests that there is a rather more complicated process at work. His choice of venue for the making of his announcement is also salient, bearing in mind that his main place of work is in Lexington, Kentucky in the USA. He also runs several organisations in Limmasol, Cyprus, including the Reprogen Organization, which advertises its purpose as ‘Parenthood through Reproductive Cloning’. Zavos's website (⟨www.zavos.org⟩) includes the statement: ‘The Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine and IVF is not involved in any form of Reproductive Cloning. Any inquiries regarding any form of cloning should be directed to Reprogen Organization’. In fact, Zavos's attempts at media management batten on to, and at the same time threaten to undermine, the efforts of both scientists and government to establish the UK as a locus for cutting edge science and to secure public sympathy with that objective. Unlike the USA, the UK government is in favour of therapeutic cloning and the creation of new stem cell lines for medical research and both the government and the scientific community have been keen to promote this as a differentiator for UK science. Much has also been made of the regulatory foresight of the UK in establishing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, initially to regulate IVF, but subsequently to regulate any clinical or scientific endeavour working with human embryos. So discursive claims have been made for the UK being uniquely situated to carry out well-regulated and ethical scientific research using human embryos, on which Zavos has capitalised (see Parry, 2003 for an analysis of the parliamentary debates leading to the 2001 amendment of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act to permit the use of human embryos in stem cell research).

The January press call was not the first time that Zavos had piqued the interest of the UK media. On his own and in partnership with Dr Severino Antinori, he had several times already made bullish claims about his intention to preside over the conception and birth of the first child produced through human reproductive cloning. If the preceding sentence seems somewhat circumlocutory, it is due to the enormous difficulty involved using precise language about cloning. Further, as Leach (1999, p. 218) points out: ‘what we have called ‘cloning’ has metamorphosed through a number of names for a number of different procedures that have been used by agricultural biologists, molecular biologists and fertility researchers working on humans, animals and isolated genetic material’. A basic definition of cloning is asexual reproduction, but the word is used to describe a number of distinct processes, including the one to which Zavos refers, the production of a human embryo through transferring the nucleus of a somatic cell into an enucleated egg, and the subsequent implantation of that embryo into a womb. Referring to an individual as a clone, however, introduces further confusion. Is it the child that might result from such a process that would be correctly termed a clone, or the donor that provided the somatic cell? The efforts of scientists who wish to pursue stem cell research to effect a radical distinction between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning, also make attention to terminology in these debates crucial. I argue that the response to Zavos's claims by UK scientists and legislators was co-ordinated to protect that distinction as well as to distinguish themselves from what their particular communities holds to be ‘bad’ science—risky, unethical and/or undocumented. Parry points to the rhetorical severing of therapeutic from reproductive cloning at a very early stage in the post-Dolly public debate (Parry, 2003, p. 147). This distinction has been maintained in the intervening years, although recent developments in Korea and at the Newcastle Centre for Life have placed it under increasing strain.

Cultural cartography

This ‘media storm’ around the Zavos affair was a prime example of what Gieryn (1999) calls ‘cultural cartography’ or, put more simply, boundary management. Three key separate but related boundaries are demarcated in the coverage, that between maverick scientists or ‘cowboy cloners’ and ethical and responsible establishment scientists, that between human reproductive and therapeutic cloning, and that between the well-regulated UK and the unregulated or poorly regulated elsewhere. A further boundary, between humans and (non-human) animals is destabilised in ways that serve to support the demarcation of the other boundaries. This paper will rely on textual analysis of press and TV news coverage of the initial event and the responses it stimulated, but future work will seek the perspectives of key participants in the contest.

This particular episode of cultural cartography took place between Friday, 16 January 2004 and Saturday, 24 January 2004 with a brief coda on Thursday, 5 February 2004. However, it can also be viewed as an interesting intersection of a number of long-running struggles for credibility and epistemic authority, and without the historical context of those pre-existing struggles it would be impossible to do full justice to this case study. News coverage of human reproductive cloning has burgeoned since the announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, while Finn Bowring notes specialist and public debate about the possibilities of human reproductive cloning in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the USA, but points out that ‘(B)y the end of the 1970s the cloning controversy had largely died away, with most biologists agreeing that the reproduction of human beings without the unification of gametes was a fantasy beyond the world of serious science’ (Bowring, 2004). The announcement of Dolly's birth might then be taken to signal a watershed in cloning related stories for its revelation that it had been possible to clone a sheep using a somatic (differentiated) cell with cell nuclear replacement technology. However, if the event did come as a surprise to the scientific and legislative communities, a response was quickly forthcoming. For example, in the UK, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported in March 1997 on ‘The Cloning of Animals from Adult Cells’ and sought the advice of the Human Genetics Advisory Commission (HGAC) on the implications of the work for human genetics. The UK government subsequently mounted a public consultation under the aegis of the HGAC and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in early 1998. In the USA, immediately following the breaking of the Dolly story in The Observer, President Clinton instructed the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to report back to him in 90 days on the legal and ethical implications of the technology deployed in the birth of Dolly. The outcomes were remarkably similar on either side of the Atlantic. Human reproductive cloning was deemed to present enormous ethical dilemmas, all of which were secondary to the fact that cell nuclear transfer was much too uncertain and risky a procedure to use for potential human beings. It was also the case both in the UK and the USA that it was considered important to preserve the opportunity to research non-reproductive forms of cloning: ‘therapeutic cloning’ (UK) or ‘the cloning of human DNA sequences and cell lines’ (USA). This proviso seems to have been made by scientists and legislators, as reports on either side of the Atlantic pointed to the lack of scientific education about genetics in the general public. I argue, in this paper, that much of the response to Zavos's claims by scientists and legislators is motivated by the desire to ensure that the public's perceived antipathy to human reproductive cloning does not ‘rub off’ on therapeutic cloning—an area of research that it is hoped will bring both therapeutic applications and economic benefits to the scientists and nations who exploit it successfully.

The first human clone of 2004

In the week running up to Saturday, 17 January, Dr Panos Zavos and his UK Associate, Dr Paul Rainsbury, were trailing a press conference due to take place on the afternoon of that Saturday. The pre-conference material suggested that Dr Zavos and his partner had arranged the event to announce that they were about to offer IVF clients the possibility of embryo splitting—the procedure that the Jones Institute had called cloning but which is no longer understood to satisfy that terminology. As I have already suggested, there is much linguistic confusion around terms such as clone or cloning—is it the planned baby who is cloned, or a clone, or is it the donor of the somatic cell who is cloned? The definition given in the Executive Summary of Cloning Human Beings is succinct and descriptive: ‘humans might someday be cloned—created from a single somatic cell without sexual reproduction’. Of course the method used in the (re)production of Dolly and that Zavos claimed to have used involves the merging the nucleus of a somatic cell with an enucleated egg which does contain mitochondrial DNA, so while sexual reproduction is bypassed, strictly speaking ‘a single somatic cell’ is not the origin of the cloned offspring. The only national daily that picked up the story prior to the staged event was The Independent, but that it did so suggests that Zavos and Rainsbury sent out at least ambiguous, if not deliberately misleading, press calls. At the conference Zavos did spend a great deal of time taking his audience through some of the fundamentals of IVF and embryo splitting as well as suggesting the benefits this new commercially offered procedure would deliver. The splitting would offer prospective IVF parents the opportunity to store an embryo, identical to one that is implanted, for later usage. This might be for a later attempt at implantation if the first attempted pregnancy was unsuccessful, or it might provide the opportunity to harvest matched stem cells, if a child resulting from the first embryo requires treatment later in life. As it turned out, however, the embryo splitting story was just the teaser for the journalists. Towards the end of the press conference, Zavos made the announcement that was his primary purpose. He claimed to have produced a cloned embryo using the skin cell of an infertile adult male and to have implanted the embryo into the infertile man's female partner who was also described as infertile. His announcement seems to have aroused mixed emotions in his audience—outrage, scepticism, derision and repugnance, depending on which account you read. Nonetheless, footage from the conference led TV news bulletins that evening, and there was considerable press coverage on the Sunday and Monday, with sporadic coverage until 24 January. For the purposes of this paper, I will not include correspondence from readers, or cloning related features that do not specifically refer to the Zavos controversy.

The coverage in the sample included the already mentioned extension of the media event by another interested party, ‘mainstream scientists’ who, not content with pouring cold water on Zavos's claims when invited to comment, took the more aggressive step of dispatching a collective open letter to the media calling on them to stop reporting cloning claims. There was significantly less coverage, on 4 February, of the announcement that the woman in whose womb Zavos had allegedly implanted the cloned embryo had not become pregnant. We might infer that this was because Zavos's critics had prosecuted such a successful media campaign, that the failure was taken as read. Although an alternative, commonsensical interpretation of this discrepancy in coverage is that the announcement that something did not happen is not newsworthy, the widespread coverage of Zavos's staged event repeatedly expressed doubt that there was any foundation to his reported claims. However, the ire that Zavos provoked in making his announcement, and the immediate backlash then unleashed, perhaps served to inflate the column centimetres devoted to this controversy. As the leader in the Sunday Times suggested, just the day after the press conference, ‘Dr Zavos did enough to bring the political and medical establishment down on his head like a ton of bricks’ (2004, 18 January, p. 20). The leader also characterised Zavos and others who had made similar claims as ‘modern-day scientific snake-oil salesmen’. The metaphor subsequently employed by the ‘scientific establishment’ for Zavos and his ilk was ‘cowboy cloners’ and it is tempting to link it with both the Western frontier in the United States and the historic and continuing resonance of frontier mythology and metaphor in science. However, the purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which scientific expertise was claimed and represented in media reportage around this event, and how this expertise was linked to national identity, and the right kind of cloning.

Claiming and attributing expertise

The claiming of expertise or, as Gieryn (1983) puts it, of ‘epistemic authority’—is only a mark of distinction if other parties are shown to lack expertise. In his explorations of such ‘credibility contests’ Gieryn identifies three genres; expulsion, expansion and protection of autonomy. In the contest between Zavos and UK embryology and fertility scientists I argue that all three genres are in play. The UK scientists seek to expel Zavos from ‘the scientific community’ at the same time as he attempts to expand his acknowledged expertise as a fertility specialist into the field of human reproductive cloning. The UK scientists are also seeking to protect their autonomy in developing the field of therapeutic cloning. The expulsion of Zavos and any others who seek to pursue human reproductive cloning is a necessary strategy for the protection of such autonomy. The fact that this is still an open contest, albeit one that seems well on its way to closure, may be inferred from the instability of the attribution of expertise to Zavos. Although when he is quoted or cited in the body of news stories he is referred to as ‘a fertility specialist’, ‘an IVF expert’, a ‘reproductive specialist’, a ‘fertility pioneer’, a ‘fertility expert’, suggesting that his skills are not in dispute, the headlines of the news stories frame him much less positively. He is a ‘US fertility maverick’, ‘the clone race maverick’, ‘Dr Frankenstein’, a ‘cowboy cloner’. Altogether, in the 29 press stories in this sample, there were 17 references to Zavos as an expert, or claiming that he had the expertise to achieve his ends while there were 15 neutral identifications of him as a doctor or scientists. Just seven references were explicitly negative about his expertise when they identified him. Even the ‘cowboy cloner’ references more frequently referred by name to Severino Antinori or the Raelians than to Zavos, although his inclusion in their number was heavily implied. This analogy was achieved visually in the BBC news bulletin by including stock footage of a Clonaid press conference presided over by Brigitte Boissellier although no sound was used from this earlier bulletin nor was there any explicit voice over commentary. Nonetheless, his announcement that he had implanted a cloned embryo was represented as a dubious claim. How is it that he can be identified as an expert in the field of fertility, that his announcements are deemed newsworthy, and yet those announcements are judged to be questionable or even fraudulent?

In terms of newsworthiness, it is striking to note that references to ‘the world's first cloned baby’ or the ‘world's first cloned human’ pepper the news stories about Zavos published between 16 and 19 January. In 20 stories, this type of breakthrough phrase is used fourteen times. So however it is hedged about with disclaimers and equivocations by journalists and sources the prospect of the birth of the first human being by means of cloning technology is sufficiently newsworthy for journalists to continue to report such claims despite their scepticism. To be scooped on such a story would be unthinkable. Research conducted by the Wellcome Trust in 1998 indicated that many members of the public believe that it is simply a matter of time before human reproductive cloning is effected, however repellent they find the notion. In the light of the massive developments that have taken place in reproductive technologies in the past thirty years, perhaps journalists share that belief. Even sources clearly signalled as reputable in the press coverage, such as ‘Simon Fishel, a pioneer of the IVF technique in the 1970s and now director of the Centre for Assisted Reproduction in Nottingham’, seem to indicate that if human reproductive cloning is currently unsafe and illegal, it may not remain that way for ever. A remark from Fishel closes a piece in The Guardian headed ‘Scientist Attacks Hype over Clone Research’: ‘At some state in the future, we may have an intelligent debate about cloning,’ he added, ‘at this stage, it is unethical’ (Jha, 2004a, p. 8). This ambiguous, ambivalent conclusion is particularly striking when compared to the opening paragraph of the report which also draws on remarks by Fishel:

A leading fertility researcher has warned that the media storm surrounding an American doctor's claims to have produced a cloned embryo will only serve to paint a heavily distorted picture of work in this field. (Jha, 2004a)

Within the news stories and articles considered there are obviously two key sets of commentary on Zavos—that provided by the journalists in their framing of the stories and that provided by the sources that the journalists quote or cite. The factual representation of the historical context of his claim and the manner of his presentation also figure in the creation of doubt about his expertise or veracity. In terms of the representation of expertise, we might argue that other sources than Zavos may be attributed sufficient authority for their claims to be believed without being required to provide proof. The first story in this particular cycle of Zavos's interaction with the UK media was published in The Independent and to a large extent sets the pattern for the framing of this story. It opens with a focus on condemnation of Zavos's cloning plans by the HFEA, ‘Britain's fertility watchdog’, and reiteration that human reproductive cloning is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment. It then casts further doubt on his expert standing by referring to an earlier claim made by Zavos that ‘he had created the world's first cloned embryo and was ready to implant it in a surrogate mother’, noting that he had predicted the birth of the first clone by the end of 2003 and that ‘That deadline has come and gone without sign of progress’. The story then links Zavos's claims with other unsubstantiated claims about cloning from questionable sources, ‘notably the Raelian cult’ but then second guesses itself with the proviso: ‘But Dr Zavos has the technical expertise to achieve his ends’. The conclusion of the story is particularly interesting in light of the way in which this story developed. It begins with the assertion that: ‘He is thought to be coming to Britain to generate further publicity for reproductive cloning, which has been outlawed in the US and Europe’. So, in effect, the story is suggesting that Zavos is attempting to expand his epistemic authority to encompass reproductive cloning, and indeed to contest for the credibility of reproductive cloning as a treatment for infertility, and it sets this suggestion in direct opposition to the claims of Suzi Leather, identified as the chairwoman of the HFEA. She attempts to expel both Zavos and human reproductive cloning from the territory of good science/scientists:

It (reproductive cloning) is utterly wrong and against the law. My understanding is that he (Dr Zavos) is procuring women to experiment on them.

All the work on reproductive cloning in animals indicates it is absolutely unsafe and causes great suffering. No woman could make an informed choice to take part in this because, if she knew the risks, she wouldn't do it. (Laurance, 2004a, p. 3)

This quotation condenses a number of important contests for authority. It states that reproductive cloning is wrong on moral/ethical and legal grounds. It distinguishes research from treatment by suggesting that, in pursuing human reproductive cloning, Zavos is carrying out experiments rather than providing treatment. However, it then frames potential harms in a medical context by using the terminology of suffering, risk and informed choice. The term ‘procuring’ is also loaded because of its potential connotations of sleaze and pimping. If the article had ended on this strong statement, the conclusion that readers should draw about Zavos would have been unequivocal. However, it leaves the contest somewhat open by returning to reporting on embryo splitting as if it is a proven technology, which it is not, and the concluding citation of the HFEA is much weaker than Ms Leather's remarks: ‘The HFEA said that, under its code of practice, clinics were expected not to produce embryos for treatment by embryo splitting’ (Laurance, 2004a).

The headlines for the television bulletins set the same news agenda as did the bulk of the newspaper headlines. According to BBC1 News, ‘a fertility expert claims he's implanted the first cloned human embryo’, ITV Weekend News reported, ‘Fury at a maverick scientist's claim to have cloned a human being’, while Channel 4 News really raised the controversy stakes: ‘A genetic bombshell—a woman implanted with her husband's cloned embryo! Is this American doctor a medical hero or a monster?’. The Channel 4 News gave the most extensive coverage—approximately seven and a half minutes—to the announcement with its headline preceding the main title sequence and every single image in the title being semiotically related to this single story. The Channel 4 coverage of the press announcement is particularly salutary as it is apparent on viewing that while the Channel 4 journalist is interviewing Patrick Cusworth of Life in the foreground, that Dr Panos Zavos is being interviewed in the background by another journalist. This makes it absolutely apparent that the media event staged by Zavos drew out a host of interested parties determined to contest his claims at source. In fact, in SkyNews's live feed, Dr Zavos welcomed representatives of the HFEA to the press conference so despite the derision with which his announcement was greeted by scientists and journalists—according to ITV Weekend News Zavos was ‘derided…demonised…defiant’—the media event that he instigated was heavily attended by significant sources.

By the time Zavos did make his announcement at the press event that he had implanted a cloned embryo, Suzi Leather was not the only source the press had to draw on. Television footage of the press conference shows Zavos welcoming representatives of the HFEA along with journalists, whilst post-conference interviews reveal the attendance of John Reid, Secretary of State for Health, and Patrick Cusworth of Life, amongst others. So it appears that the event was a great draw for contenders in contestation over cloning, and indeed over any embryology related medicine or science. This crucible of contestation is evident in the sources quoted in the subsequent news reports. Other than Dr Zavos the most frequently cited sources were John Reid, Secretary of State for Health, Wolf Reik, generally referred to as ‘a cloning expert’, sometimes with details of his place of work and the Royal Society, sometimes via an unnamed spokesperson and sometimes Lord May as President. Patrick Cusworth and Life, for which he is a spokesperson, also figure heavily, as the anti-abortion lobby is recognised by journalists as a key contributor media debates about reproduction.

Each of these key sources is used to mobilise distinctive rhetorical positions that position Zavos outside the space that they mark off as acceptable terrain. The consistency of quotations across broadsheets and tabloids suggests that journalists were working with press releases or briefing documents rather than conducting unique interviews. John Reid is used to articulate the government's position which he represents as depending on public opinion:

It is illegal to clone a child in the UK … We are one of the few countries in the world who have passed legislation to ban this possibility.

There will be no cloned babies in the UK while I am Secretary of State for Health.

This Government shares the widespread public repugnance that human cloning could be attempted and views this as a gross misuse of genetic science. (Knapp, 2004, p. 2)

(For example, see Laurance, 2004b; Leake, 2004.) So there is an attempt by Reid to position the UK as a well-regulated terrain for genetic science and to identify legislation as the appropriate means of prohibiting the ‘misuse’ of science. Clearly, in his role as Secretary of State, Reid is mandated to speak for national government, but the juxtaposition of this focus on nationality with persistent labelling of Zavos as American, US-based, Cyprus-born in news reports suggests that national boundaries and belonging provide a valuable rhetorical ploy for expelling Zavos from the scientific and regulative community, figured in these reports as a UK rather than a global community.

Wolf Reik, who will later place his name to the open letter to News Editors, is referred to as ‘a cloning expert’ in six of the initial 20 stories running between the 16 and 19 January. His institutional credentials, where mentioned, are given as ‘the Babraham Institute, Cambridge’ but there is no mention of the institute's credentials. Its website boasts the mission statement that: ‘The Babraham Institute is an educational charity focussed on delivering science of the highest quality that will add significantly to knowledge and find applications in the biomedical, biotechnological and pharmaceutical sectors’ (http://www.babraham.ac.uk/research/index.htm). In the open letter, Dr Wolf Reik identifies himself as ‘Head, Developmental Genetics Programme, Babraham Institute’. We might reasonably infer, therefore, that he has an interest in protecting the autonomy of research scientists to work on therapeutic cloning. However, this complex set of interests is condensed to ‘a cloning expert’ in press coverage. Reik is quoted or cited to make a number of key points in this ‘media storm’. One of these is a technical point about the high number of spontaneous abortions and deformities resulting from reproductive cloning in animals. The other is a moral/ethical judgement that Zavos is exploiting the desperation of infertile couples. Whilst his professional credentials certainly appear to qualify him to make the former point, the latter point can be read as an attempt to claim authority over a field in which he is not expert.

A rather different set of rhetorical strategies is used by the Royal Society and Lord May as its president. Both in initial responses to Zavos's claims, and in his role as signatory to the open letter to the media, reported on 21 January, the Royal Society and Lord May use the rhetoric of evidence and of peer review to put Zavos's epistemic authority in question: ‘Scientific journals and conferences are the place to present your work—not at hugely theatrical press conferences’. In the open letter dated 21 January 2004, Lord May is just one of 13 signatories, but he is also the author of an article published in Global Agenda, The World Economic Forum's magazine, that called for the UN to place a global ban human reproductive cloning but leave decisions about therapeutic cloning to individual countries. In the article, Lord May suggested that ‘the United States appears from the outside to offer a haven for those wishing to carry out reproductive cloning on humans’ because attempts to pass national legislation have repeatedly foundered on the question of whether to rule against therapeutic cloning at the same time. However, he also notes that no evidence has been forthcoming from any of the ‘cowboy cloners’ that they have succeeded in cloning a human embryo so that cloned humans may still belong in the realm of science fiction. Of course, evidence is also a journalistic requirement, so this rhetoric is already in place in the framing of the story (May, 2004). The Independent on Sunday, for example, undercuts its own headline: ‘Woman is carrying first cloned embryo, claims doctor’ with the textual proviso: ‘There was no independent verification of his claim’ (Laurance, 2004b). It also demonstrates recognition of the collective nature of the global scientific enterprise, as well as the typical experimental trajectory of small mammals, to primates, to humans, with its concluding sentence: ‘Embryo-splitting has not yet been successfully carried out in primates, the animals most closely related to humans’. In The Observer, the correspondent reporting on the news conference is even more explicit in her representation of Zavos as outside the scientific peer community. After claiming that his announcement ‘was greeted with laughter and disbelief’ she claims:

The press conference descended into farce when he criticised the highly respected medical journals Nature and Science, saying he wouldn't want his work to be reviewed or published in them because they did not have enough experts to deal with it. (Revill, 2004)

However, the open letter to News Editors does not think journalists go far enough in their scepticism about Zavos's claims. It explicitly asks them ‘to reconsider the prominence given to repeated claims by certain scientists that they have cloned a human being’. And the letter attempts to engage with journalists around the shared value of ‘convincing evidence’, claiming that Antinori, the Raelians and Zavos have shown themselves to be ‘more interested in publicity than advancing science’ because of their neglect of scientific protocols for peer reviews. The letter goes on to suggest that: ‘the disproportionate coverage given to these stories convey(s) the impression that fertility scientists in general are engaged in the race to clone the first human’ (see ⟨http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/press_releases_2004.htm⟩ for full text of the open letter and the initial press release prepared in response to Zavos's press call). Whilst the letter is striking for the way in which it references the professional values of both scientists and journalists in a bid to expel Zavos from the terrain of legitimate cloning-related research, it does not seem to take full account of the sceptical framing of the press and television coverage. Each television news bulletin on Saturday, 17 January positioned Zavos's claims as dubious—references were made to ‘extreme scepticism’, to ‘fury at a maverick scientists’ claim', and indeed the first words of the Channel 4 news bulletin after the title credits were: ‘No proof whatsoever’. Mark Webster of ITN speaking to camera outside the Department of Health described him as ‘at best a maverick, at worst a fraud’. They also positioned him as an inveterate publicity- seeker: Channel 4 News suggested that he was ‘a self-publicist and showman’ whilst ITV Weekend News described him as ‘revelling in the media spotlight’. Like the newspaper stories that followed, the news bulletins constructed a clear opposition between Dr Panos Zavos and the scientific community—a community that was conceptualised as British, both through the choice of UK sources and through specific reference to ‘British scientists’ who were dubious about the claims of this ‘American doctor’. Alex Thomson, presenter of Channel 4 News, conducted a live interview with Zavos as part of the channel's coverage of the event during which he persistently differentiated Zavos from proper scientists and claimed that none of the 800 peer reviewed publications to which Zavos referred were published in reputable journals. He asserted that Zavos's announcement was purely about fame and money and continued talking over the top of his interviewee when Dr Zavos attempted to answer his questions and to take issue with some of the points he had made about how human reproductive cloning relates to similar experiments with primates. In such a context, for scientists to claim that the public might understand Zavos as representative of mainstream scientists seems to take inadequate account of the way in which he was framed by journalists as maverick, mendacious and unethical, even before the intervention of the open letter.

The letter is reported on with minimal editorial debate on 21 January in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times, but Alok Jha's take on their intervention in The Guardian on 22 January, in effect, calls the scientists on the very values that they have rhetorically harnessed in their attempt to persuade journalists to cease reporting on human reproductive cloning:

But perhaps these outbursts from the science community, usually best noted for its objective calm, slightly miss the point. If the stories—correct, exaggerated or otherwise—have already been published, and the public is asking about the possibility of reproductive cloning, does that not define the very beginnings of a debate? So is it not better to bring the full weight of the scientific evidence to bear and address public concern head on? And why should scientists demand the controls of any debate that has an element of science attached to it? (Jha, 2004b)

A cynical answer to this question would be that scientists underestimate the general public's ability to discriminate between reproductive and therapeutic cloning in the context of an apparent consensus amongst the UK scientific community that therapeutic cloning and stem cell research are positive developments to be protected. In protecting their autonomy to set research priorities and to secure public money for research, perhaps these scientists feel confusion of human reproductive and therapeutic cloning is best avoided by urging a news blackout. If they were to be successful in achieving this objective then they really would have won the contest for epistemic authority over the terrain of cloning and expelled Dr Zavos outside its boundaries.

Conclusion

This episode is a striking example of scientists using their status as experts: ‘to both draw a line between their own work and that produced by quacks and charlatans (Collins & Pinch, 1982), and to defend themselves against the consequences of uncritical consumption of their research by non-scientists such as people in business and government—the ‘lay public’ (Gieryn, 1983)' (Glasner & Rothman, 2004). But the scientists who wielded this expertise in order to effect the distinctions noted between respectable and maverick scientists, between therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and between the well-regulated UK and the poorly regulated elsewhere, attempted to push their claims further in this incident. They also sought to delimit for the future the boundaries of the appropriate news agenda with regard to reproductive cloning and to determine what distinctions they considered the lay public to be capable of making. Bearing in mind the opportunity that this media event provided to scientists to address the risks posed by reproductive cloning, and the virtual unanimity of opposition to Zavos and his claims demonstrated by both sources and journalists, this is an intriguing strategy. The issues of expertise, peer review, scientific ethics, regulation and legislation that were raised by this event, and debated at length in the newspapers and on the television, seem to have constituted a prime opportunity for scientists and legislators to communicate with ‘the public’ about the current state of the science and its social context. Further, the manner in which the story was framed by journalists would seem to militate against the risk of uncritical consumption of Zavos's claims. Perhaps the issue of boundary management then has to be approached in a wider context than that of the particular debate about cloning. It may be that the open letter should be read as just one salvo in a ongoing battle to preserve accepted scientific protocols of peer review that have been violated by a series of cases in which researchers have announced results to the mass media before submitting them to peer review through the scientific press. (Glasner refers to the Cold Fusion research, and Arvad Puztai's claims about GM food safety. The MMR controversy could also be instanced.) Further research is necessary to explore the different stakes that scientists and journalists had in this particular news event, as well as to determine whether the confusion that the scientists claim that it could cause is experienced by the publics who read or viewed the stories. This is the next stage of the Media, Culture and Genomics project.

Acknowledgements

The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC Research Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics.

This paper benefited from feedback from my colleagues on the CESAGen Media, Culture & Genomics project, Professor Jenny Kitzinger, Professor Maureen McNeil and Dr Kate O'Riordan. Thanks also to Emma Hughes, Research Associate, SCARR Network Project Media Discourses and Framing.