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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Medicine's Wild West Show

By Natalie Angier
Posted Thursday, Feb. 24, 2000, at 2:38 PM ET

Jonathan,

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I have to admit that I didn't imprint on the top-100 radio songs when I was a teen-ager, because I was a teen-ager in the '70s (weren't you?), which in my view marked an even lower point in the evolution of rock and pop music than do the current naughts. How I suffered in high school, driving up and down the main drag of New Buffalo, Mich., listening to Led Zeppelin, the Guess Who, Yes, and Blue Oyster Cult. Disco was swell to dance to, but, please, let's leave the libretto of Saturday Night Fever out of it.

So you can imagine my relief that my daughter's favorite songs are "Yellow Submarine" and "When I'm 64." She dreams about the Beatles and wants me to buy her a Paul doll. Wait till I break the news to her that her beloved Sir Paul is just about ... 64.

You're absolutely right that gene therapy is being set up as the latest scapegoat. There are no more crimes being committed in the name of gene therapy than there are elsewhere in medicine, particularly experimental medicine that relies on the use of human subjects, including studies of new chemotherapy drugs, new psychiatric drugs, and, as we're learning, drugs for toddlers. The fertility industry is medicine's most burlesque version of the Wild West Show, and for that our self-righteous Congress has itself to blame: Its repeated refusal to finance any research that might remotely involve even the homeopathic memory of human fetal tissue has driven nearly all fertility research over to the bounteous, unfettered bosom of private, for-profit companies. I have no doubt that any day now we'll hear of a customer at the local Gestate-While-U-Wait who is six months pregnant with the world's first human clone. And why not? If somebody is willing to pay, why not?

In any case, the juggernaut against gene therapy is now too big to stop. The FDA and the NIH are trying to save their own hides and counter the charge of negligence by suddenly turning into rabid watchdogs. They're going after individual gene-therapy researchers and tearing them to bits as publicly as possible. Paradoxically, Jim Wilson has suffered the most because he was relatively honest: He reported Jesse Gelsinger's death to the NIH immediately. Other researchers have not been so forthcoming, and so they haven't been attacked so virulently--at least not yet. Rep. Waxman is going after the easiest possible targets--federal agencies.

Spectacles like these, together with the sequential scolding of McCain and Bush, depending on the latest primary results, remind me that we're all a bunch of lovable baboons. Nothing is more fun than clubbing the poor slob who's already down.

Time to pull out my old Bread tapes ...