91av

IN THE dog days of August in Washington, the national press gets restless.
The President is usually on holiday, Congress is in recess and the Supreme Court
isn’t in session. So for the Washington press corps, things have been looking
bleak.

Until, that is, the National Academy of Sciences recently rode to their
rescue. A more unlikely saviour is hard to imagine. The academy is “a private,
independent, non-profit organisation that advises the federal government on
science and technology policy matters”. Those matters tend to be far from
newsworthy, like the “Review of federal motor carrier safety administration’s
truck crash causation study” or that crowd pleaser, the Fourth Meeting of the
Subcommittee on Dog and Cat Nutrition.

But the academy, showing a rare sensitivity to the needs of the national
press, served up an extremely tasty and newsworthy helping of human cloning.
Even though virtually every scientist who knows anything about human cloning has
already said it would be crazy to try it, the academy decided to debate its
scientific and medical aspects. They had no trouble finding serious scientists
to criticise any attempt to criticise human cloning, but the academy decided
that to be fair, they had to invite the scientists who think cloning is just
fine and that we should try it right away.

The meeting was, to say the least, a spectacle
(see 91av, 18 August, p 6).
Dozens of cameras and mikes caught every word and gesture from the
prospective cloners, pausing only briefly for the obligatory interview with the
nay-sayers from the “official” voice of science. At one point, the media feeding
frenzy got so hot and heavy that the would-be cloner Severino Antinori of
Italy’s International Associated Research Institute was trapped by a dozen
cameras as he tried to leave the men’s room.

Academy members seemed a bit unnerved by what they had wrought. But they felt
they had to hear from the renegades, even at the risk of creating a media
circus. And they succeeded.

AN EARTH-observing satellite known as Triana is going through its final
check-up at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside Washington.
Unfortunately, once the tests are done, Triana will be put in a box and moved
into storage, where it will stay for the foreseeable future.

Officially, Triana is simply a victim of NASA’s current budgetary squeeze. It
was designed for launch aboard the space shuttle, but the funds for shuttle
launches have been slashed and the space agency has had to make some difficult
choices. Can’t keep the International Space Station waiting, that’s for
sure.

But Triana is also carrying some iffy political baggage. You see, Triana was
the brainchild of Al Gore. In 1998, Gore, then vice-president, came up with the
idea of a satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth from space, a
reminder that we all live on one planet. Critics immediately dubbed the project
Goresat. Even though no officials at NASA call the project by that name, they
all know what you’re talking about when you use it.

Now, you must remember Al Gore. He’s the guy who tried to steal the last
election from George W. Bush. So as much as the space agency protests that the
decision to shelve Triana for the time being was made strictly for budgetary
reasons, one can’t help thinking there may have been a little political payback
involved as well.