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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Mouseketeers, Goslings, and the Grammys

By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Thursday, Feb. 24, 2000, at 10:46 AM ET

Natalie,

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Good morning. The front page of our local paper, the Doylestown Intelligencer, gives a lot of space to the Grammys today, and I see that one teen-age former Mouseketeer was disappointed last night because another teen-age former Mouseketeer was the surprise winner standing at the podium: "I'm totally without a speech whatsoever ..." It makes me sad to realize how much the love songs on the radio matter when you're a teen-ager and how little most of them matter by the time you're the parent of a teen-ager. Maybe it's like the imprinting of goslings. We imprint on a mother tongue when we're 1 or 2 years old, hopping around in the nest, and then we imprint on the radio's top 100 bird songs when we're about to leave the nest ... And what are we imprinting on now?

On the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, another shout at gene therapy: "Federal Gene-Test Oversight Criticized." As I said the other day, I'm not setting myself as an apologist for gene therapy. And I'm going to track down and read those stories your husband Rick Weiss has been writing on the subject for the Washington Post. But when I read this story today in the Inky, I wondered whether the whole field isn't getting set up in Washington for target practice, almost the way the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist David Baltimore was set up, unfairly, a little while ago, in that notorious scientific-misconduct case. The field may well turn out, on closer and closer inspection, to have gotten terribly sloppy; it certainly will benefit from stricter oversight. But in today's story, Rep. Henry Waxman is lambasting the field as a slaughter of the innocents. He charges that one gene-therapy effort at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was running a trial with a protocol that resulted in "the deaths of 75 percent of the participating patients." He forgets, apparently, that the patients involved were dying of cancer. The therapy didn't help them but it didn't kill them either.

If Waxman and others want to do it, they can make some headlines investigating the gene-therapy field, because I'm sure there are genuine messes to rake up. But I'd hate to see the field made a scapegoat. The whole of medical practice could stand more oversight. I was glad to read that sensible editorial in today's Times, "Exposing Medical Mistakes," endorsing Clinton's proposals for improving patient safety. And I was alarmed to read that the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, just out today, apologizes for having allowed doctors with a financial conflict of interest to review 19 different drug studies in the journal's pages in the last three years.

OK, got to go. The only pop CD I bought this year was Beck's Mutations. I bought it for the title.

Jonathan