MUCH OF THE CURRENT DEBATE over what is generally known as therapeutic cloning--that is, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) cloning conducted for research purposes rather than reproduction--centers on the nature of the thing that is created by the cloning process. Until recently, this issue wasn't controversial: Cloning, it was widely agreed, created a new human embryo.

Thus, in 1997, President Bill Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission's report on the ethical issues involved in human cloning stated: "The Commission began its discussion fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg [SCNT] involves the creation of an embryo."

In 2000, Robert P. Lanza, Arthur L. Caplan, and other biotechnologist and bioethicist co-authors acknowledged in the Journal of the American Medical Association that "cell replacement through nuclear transfer," e.g., SCNT therapeutic cloning, "requires the deliberate creation and disaggregation of a human embryo." Similarly, a 2002 report published by the National Academy of Sciences stated that after successful SCNT, "a series of sequential cell divisions leads to the formation of a blastocyst, or pre-implantation embryo." (A blastocyst is the scientific name given to a human embryo at about the fifth day of development.)

Also in 2002, in Human Cloning and Human Dignity, the President's Council on Bioethics, while deeply divided over the moral propriety of therapeutic cloning, unanimously agreed that SCNT creates an embryo, that is, an individual nascent human life:

[T]he initial product of somatic nuclear transfer is a living (one-celled) human embryo. The immediate intention of transferring the nucleus is precisely to produce just such an entity: one that is alive (rather than non living), one that is human (rather than nonhuman or animal), and one that is an embryo, an entity capable of developing into an articulated organismic whole (rather than just a somatic cell capable only of replication into more of the same cell type.)

THIS CONSENSUS DID NOT LAST. Public polling made it evident that a majority opposed therapeutic cloning when the poll question acknowledged that cloning creates a new human embryo. (For example, a recent Virginia Commonwealth University poll found that by margin of 59 percent to 34 percent, respondents opposed "using cloning technology if it is used to create human embryos that will provide stem cells for human therapeutic purposes.")

To overcome their political problem, biotech industry lobbyists and their allies mounted a propaganda campaign intended to turn accepted biology on its head by denying that human SCNT culminates in the creation of a new human embryo. What followed is a case study in media bias.

In the great cloning debate, the mainstream media follows Big Biotech's lead as faithfully as Ginger Rodgers did while dancing with Fred Astaire. Without missing a beat, the media obediently began to omit mention of the embryo in its descriptions of therapeutic cloning.

One could fill pages with examples of this bias by omission, but here are just a few examples--all occurring in the last week of November 2005:

* In a November 25 story on the ethical problems facing South Korean cloning researcher Woo-Suk Hwang, New York Times reporter James Brooke described SCNT: