The Atlantic | October 2002

Contents | October 2002

From the archives:

"Cloning Trevor" (June 2002)
Our correspondent spent six months tracking highly experimental work on the cells of a young boy with a life-threatening genetic disorder. By Kyla Dunn

"Of Clones and Clowns" (June 2002)
A distinguished molecular biologist discusses the "cloning circus" and the damage it is doing to serious research. By Robert A. Weinberg

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: "The Life (and Death?) of Cloning" (June 13, 2001)
Kyla Dunn, the author of The Atlantic's June cover story, talks about the state of therapeutic-cloning research and why it should not be banned.

Flashbacks: "Attack of the Clones" (June 5, 2002)
Articles by James Watson and Donald Fleming offer a look back at the evolution of the human-cloning debate.

The Atlantic Monthly | October 2002

Primary Sources

Selections from recent reports, studies, and other documents

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

After American scientists claimed, in November of last year, to have produced cloned human embryos, President Bush spoke out against cloning; soon thereafter he convened his President's Council on Bioethics. The council was directed to produce a report recommending policies on human cloning. Council members disagreed on many issues, but there was a consensus against cloning to produce children.

[Our] new and unique genetic identities are rooted in the natural procreative process. A cloned child, by contrast, is at risk of living out a life overshadowed in important ways by the life of the "original"—general appearance being only the most obvious. Indeed, one of the reasons some people are interested in cloning is that the technique promises to produce in each case a particular individual whose traits and characteristics are already known. And however much or little one's genotype actually shapes one's natural capacities, it could mean a great deal to an individual's experience of life and the ex-pectations that those who cloned him or her might have. The cloned child may be constantly compared to "the original," and may consciously or unconsciously hold himself or herself up to the genetic twin that came before. If the two individuals turned out to lead similar lives, the cloned person's achievements may be seen as derivative. If, as is perhaps more likely, the cloned person departed from the life of his or her progenitor, this very fact could be a source of constant scrutiny, especially in circumstances in which parents produced their cloned child to become something in particular. Living up to parental hopes and expectations is frequently a burden for children; it could be a far greater burden for a cloned individual ... As the child developed, it could not help but be regarded as specially akin to only one of his or her parents. The sins or failings of the father (or mother), if reappearing in the cloned child, might be blamed on the progenitor, adding to the chances of domestic turmoil. The problems of being and rearing an adolescent could become complicated should the teenage clone of the mother "reappear" as the double of the woman the father once fell in love with.

— President's Council on Bioethics
(www.bioethics.gov/cloningreport/)

Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations

This unflinching account of conditions in the twenty-two countries of the Arab world is notable for a number of reasons—foremost among them that the study was conducted not by outsiders but by a team of indigenous scholars. It ascribes most of the region's development woes to the Arab world's own economic, political, and cultural values and institutions.

The region is hampered by three key deficits that can be considered defining features:

the freedom deficit;
the women's empowerment deficit;
the human capabilities/knowledge deficit relative to income ...
From the archives:

"What Went Wrong?" (January 2002)
By all standards of the modern world—economic development, literacy, scientific achievement—Muslim civilization, once a mighty enterprise, has fallen low. Many in the Middle East blame a variety of outside forces. But underlying much of the Muslim world's travail may be a simple lack of freedom. By Bernard Lewis

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Islam" (December 12, 2001)
Is democracy compatible with Islam? Atlantic contributors from throughout the twentieth century take up the question. Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the late 1990s ... Among regions of the world, the Arab region ranks next to last as measured by GEM [gender empowerment measure]; only sub-Saharan Africa has a lower score ...

The fundamental choice is whether the region's trajectory in history will remain characterized by inertia, including the persistence of institutional structures and types of actions that have produced the substantial development challenges it currently faces, or whether prospects will emerge for an Arab renaissance that will build a prosperous future for all Arabs, especially coming generations ... The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa'moun's time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.

—United Nations Human Development Programme and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development
(www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/)

Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The Role of Mobile Telecommunications in the 21st Century

This study was—unsurprisingly—commissioned by BT Cellnet, a British mobile-communications company.

Gossip is the human equivalent of 'social grooming' among primates, which has been shown to stimulate production of endorphins, relieving stress and boosting the immune system. Two-thirds of all human conversation is gossip, because this 'vocal grooming' is essential to our social, psychological and physical well-being ...

The space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent 'grooming talk' with a tightly integrated social network. In the fast-paced modern world, we had become severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network. Mobile gossip restores our sense of connection and community, and provides an antidote to the pressures and alienation of modern life.

—Social Issues Research Centre
(www.sirc.org/publik/gossip.shtml)

Human Development Report 2002

As part of its most recent annual report the UN published a human-development "balance sheet," with global progress on the credit side and global fragmentation on the debit side.

PROGRESS: Since 1980 ... 33 military regimes [have been] replaced by civilian governments. 140 of the world's nearly 200 countries now hold multiparty elections, more than at any time in history. FRAGMENTATION: Only 82 countries, with 57% of the world's people, are fully democratic.

PROGRESS: 125 countries, with 62% of the world population, have a free or partly free press. FRAGMENTATION: 61 countries, with 38% of the world's population, still do not have a free press.

PROGRESS: The proportion of the world's people living in extreme poverty fell from 29% in 1990 to 23% in 1999. FRAGMENTATION: The richest 5% of the world's people have incomes 114 times those of the poorest 5%.

PROGRESS: The more than 500 million Internet users today are expected to grow to nearly 1 billion by 2005. FRAGMENTATION: 72% of Internet users live in high-income OECD countries, with 14% of the world's population.

PROGRESS: The 1990s saw a large decline in deaths from interstate conflicts, to 220,000 people over the decade—down from nearly three times that in the 1980s. FRAGMENTATION: Nearly 3.6 million people were killed in wars within states in the 1990s ... Half of all civilian war casualties are children, and there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers worldwide.

—United Nations Development Programme
(www.undp.org/hdr2002/)

Florida v. Thomas Cloyd and Christopher Hughes

The following is the text of a credit-card receipt from a pre-flight "meal" allegedly shared by pilots—and presumably a few friends—at Mr. Moe's, in Miami. The document was released on July 22 by prosecutors working on the case of Thomas Cloyd and Christopher Hughes, the America West pilots who were pulled off a plane before takeoff and arrested after a security screener reported smelling alcohol on the pilots.

7 34 OZ SIERRA NV 63.00

7 16 OZ SIERRA NV 33.25

1 KETTLE ONE-L, martini 7.00

1 WESTERN BURGER 8.50

1 Happy Hour Draft 2.00

Sub Total: 113.75

Tax: 8.53

07/01 04:29 TOTAL: $122.28

—Miami-Dade County State Attorney's Office
(www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/pilottab1.html)

The NICHD Study of Early Child Care

The latest results from this eleven-year study of early child care have caused considerable controversy. According to an analysis of the most recently collected data, children of women who worked thirty or more hours per week before the child was nine months old displayed significantly lower levels of school readiness on tests at age three.

—National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(Child Development, July-August 2002)

The Impact on the U.S. Economy of Lifting Restrictions on Travel to Cuba

This study found that lifting the embargo on travel to Cuba would increase the number of American visits to Cuba each year from 200,000 to 3.21 million —raising annual U.S. economic output by anywhere from $1.18 billion to $1.61 billion, and creating between 16,888 and 23,020 new jobs.

—The Brattle Group
(www.brattle.com/read/releases/cuba.final.pdf)

Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic

From the archives:

"The AIDS Exception" (June 1997)
It's time to stop granting "civil rights" to HIV—and to confront AIDS with more of the traditional tools of public health. By Chandler Burr AIDS is raging across sub-Saharan Africa and exploding in Eastern Europe, and there is cause for renewed concern in the developed world. A review of HIV infection rates among homosexual males in Vancouver, Madrid, and San Francisco shows a stark increase from 1995 to 2000. The study attributes an apparent rise in unsafe sex among gay men not to "treatment optimism" (although a significant minority do report viewing HIV less seriously since the introduction of new treatments) but, rather, to reductions in the intensity of public prevention campaigns.

—Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
(www.unaids.org/barcelona/presskit/report.html)

Profile of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Institutions: 1999-2000

According to this report, provided by a division of the Department of Education, national grade inflation is a myth: 33.5 percent of college students reported average grades of C and D or lower. Some 16.4 percent got Bs and Cs, 24.6 percent got mostly Bs, 10.9 percent got As and Bs, and 14.5 percent got mostly As. Women were more likely than men (16 percent versus 12 percent) to earn mostly As in college. The report also revealed that 45 percent of undergraduates carried a balance on their credit cards; the average balance carried was $3,066.

—National Center for Education Statistics
(nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002168.pdf)

2002 Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse

Although corporate shenanigans have gotten lots of attention recently, the amount of fraud may not in fact have increased over the past few years: according to a recent poll, fraud examiners, auditors, and accountants estimate that the U.S. economy will lose six percent of GDP to fraud this year (which comes to $4,500 per employee, on average), the same estimate they had made in 1996. Notwithstanding Enron and WorldCom, small companies were more vulnerable to fraud than large ones, and privately held companies were more vulnerable than publicly traded ones. Only 12 percent of fraudulent schemes were detected by external audits; and although more frauds were perpetrated by rank-and-file employees (58 percent of the total) than by managers or executives (36 percent), the amounts the managers stole were four times as large. Most of the perpetrators (69 percent) had never before been charged with fraud.

—Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
(www.cfenet.com/media/2002RttN/)