The front page of The New York Times on Monday carried a story by Gina Kolata that told a compelling tale of a woman with a deadly genetic disease who was able to have children knowing they did not carry the lethal gene. The children were conceived through in-vitro fertilization and tested for the gene before unaffected embryos were implanted.
This is not a new development. The idea of testing embryos for genetic diseases before implantation has been around for more than 20 years. Yet the Times put it on the front page.
The only explanation I can think of is that Kolata's evocative writing seduced her editors into thinking it was a new story. She followed a heartwarming lead anecdote with the Big Questions. The procedure, she wrote, "raises unsettling ethical questions that trouble advocates for the disabled and have left some doctors struggling with what they should tell their patients.
"When are prospective parents justified in discarding embryos? Is it acceptable, for example, for diseases like GSS, that develop in adulthood? What if a gene only increases the risk of a disease?" (The woman had Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease, or GSS.)
Big questions, yes. But this is not the first time such questions have been raised. It's not even the first time such questions have been raised at the Times. Denise Grady raised them in a Times story more than five years ago (it appeared on p. 26). The Times raised the issue in 1996, in a story about the destruction of several thousand abandoned human embryos in Great Britain. My own story in BusinessWeek raised them in 1996, almost two weeks before the Times story, I'm pleased to point out.
"Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade," Kolata writes, "but its use has soared in recent years." That's worth a story, but is it worth the front page, considering that genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than two decades?
I'm sure this will be new to many readers of the Times, and so it's a story worth doing. But the front page might be better saved for legitimate news, not for stories that might be news to some people.
-Paul Raeburn
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