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Paging Dr. Gupta! Recalling Gupta's Reporting on the "Cloned" Baby

January 09, 2009 5:19 PM

Some in the medical and science communities are now starting to question whether CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta is really an appropriate potential Surgeon General nominee given his credulous 2002 reporting on a group connected to the UFO-worshipping International Raëlian Movement which falsely claimed to have cloned a baby.

Raëlians believe that all life on Earth was created through genetic engineering and DNA synthesis conducted by extra terrestrials called the Elohim. In 2002 a group called Clonaid run by a Raëlian bishop named Brigitte Boisselier announced they had cloned a human.

Cable news outlets covered Boisselier's press conference breathlessly and often quite acceptingly, as if maybe her claims were true.

"I was shocked that a group of manifestly nutty and cultish people could command the attention of the major media," recalled Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "Sanjay and CNN definitely gave legitimacy to this claim that on its face was absurd."

Caplan says the episode had policy ramifications."Some of the subsequent debates about embryonic stem cell research over the years have hinged upon the claim that you might having people cloning embryos to conduct this research," he says. Those fears Caplan says, are "partly driven by the idea that we'll have nuts and cooks cloning people, and that comes directly from this episode. So it did have policy consequences beyond a story badly covered."

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2004, science writer Chris Mooney criticized journalists allowing the fringe groups' "claims to drive the coverage. CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, provided a case in point. When he interviewed Boisselier following her press conference, Gupta called Clonaid a group with 'the capacity to clone' and told Boisselier, credulously, 'We are certainly going to be anxiously awaiting to see some of the proof from these independent scientists next week.'"

**

On CNN's American Morning on December 27, 2002, Gupta introduced the Raëlians' story as follows:

"Everybody has been speculating on this for quite sometime," he said. "An organization called the Raëlians, sort of a fringe organization, and I say that term loosely, but an organization that believes that the Earth was populated by genetic clones and aliens. They're the ones who are going to be having this press conference, and they say that in fact they may be saying that a human baby has been cloned, a genetic match of the mother. So, gosh, I don't know what this is going to all amount to, but I'm sort of anxiously awaiting to see."

During the live coverage, as Boisselier made her way to the podium, Gupta said, "That does look like her. We are talking about Brigitte Boisselier. She is actually the scientific director of Clonaid. That's an offshoot of the Raëlian organization we've been talking so much about. Again, this is an organization that believes the Earth was populated by genetic clones by aliens. Anxious to see what she has to say. A lot of people have been waiting on her. They have been talking about the possibility of cloning a baby for about three years."

Then came the press conference in which Boisselier claimed that "the first baby clone is born."

Her name?

Eve.

"There will be proof, because I know you're expecting some proof, right?" she said.

No proof ever came.

"You know the actual testing, the actual proving, is actually not that difficult," Gupta told Wolf Blitzer later that day. "If there is a genetic match then there's a 99.9 percent chance that this is a clone, pretty good odds that, in fact, it's a clone.  Of course the strange part about all that, Wolf, is that that baby that would be born or that was born would not only be the daughter of the mother but also the twin sister from a genetic standpoint."

Gupta also ran an interview with Boisselier in which she said human cloning was just the first step.

The second step would be "accelerated growth process" so you can clone yourself and "have an adult copy of yourself in a few hours."

The third step and ultimate goal, she said, "is to be able to read, to decipher all the datas in your brain which make you who you are. Your memory, your personality. And to put download it in a clone of yourself. So that's the secret, the key toward eternal life. When you die, you wake up in a young body."

The next day Gupta told American Morning that the group claimed that "the first human clone was born. They didn't tell us where. They didn't show us the baby. There's no pictures. And there's no proof, which is why everyone is sort of left wondering, is this -- did this really happening, or is this somebody who went to the podium and is making these claims?"

In January 2003, Gupta went on the CNN media show "Reliable Sources," where he said that "I think if we had known in hindsight that there was going to be no proof at this press conference, I think that we probably would have pulled the plug."

He said Clonaid "is probably an organization that's decidedly non-legitimate, but it's probably likely that the first human clone is not going to come from a Michigan, a Wash. U. or a Stanford, a legitimate organization, it's probably going to come from somewhat of a fringe organization because of the nature of the opposition toward reproductive cloning. But most scientists in the community believe it's actually going to happen at some point. When is it going to happen, where is it going to happen, who's going to do it? I don't think any of us can answer these questions."

"Not to lend any more credibility to the Raëlians," Gupta said, "but, you know, we're still not 100 percent convinced that they didn't do it. I don't believe that they did. But we're still not 100 percent convinced they didn't do it. They have their reasons for...not providing the DNA evidence."

Gupta also said, "I'm not sure there was another way around this one. It has captured the public's imagination. Cloning will happen. We don't think this is probably going to be it, but I think it was worth covering."

**

Writes Mooney on his blog: "I don't know why Gupta and CNN gave the Raëlians such stunning coverage--but they ought to be ashamed of it. It was terrible judgment, terrible journalism. Gupta has done many important things in his career, and being sent out to cover the Raëlians may not have been his choice. Still, I would personally like to hear him explain this episode in more detail--how such a thing could happen, what went wrong, and what he has learned--if he's going to become the nation's doctor."

Says Caplan: "It was not the high point of his journalism career. I thought was somewhere between a fiasco and a disgrace."

That said, Caplan thinks this shouldn't necessarily derail Gupta being made surgeon general. "The surgeon general is basically the nation's health care communicator. If a person can communicate clearly and understands the media, that's probably a plus."

But it was a "dark bleak episode," Caplan says. "He wasn't alone -- too many in the media ran with this almost irresistible story of nuts in Starfleet uniforms -- but it wound up setting back research funding. Man, it was bad. I'm looking for a lot of repentance."

-- jpt

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