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A case in point is Peter Schmidt's cover story for the April 6 issue: "A Clash of Values: Fetal-tissue conflict in Nebraska illustrates the vulnerability of researchers to politics." Here is the opening of the article, datelined Lincoln, Nebraska:

The University of Nebraska is complicit in the killing of innocent children. Of that much, the crowd gathered inside the state Capitol seems certain.

They concluded as much after learning that the university's medical center, in Omaha, has been using tissue from aborted fetuses in its research.

Most of them view the practice as an abomination, and stopping it as God's work.

They number about 60. Their ranks include a nun, a contingent of primly dressed retirees, and several mothers with young children in tow. They are people who do not have to be at work on a Friday morning—well-positioned to devote time to a cause.

Primly dressed, are they? Obviously they are fools, then. And with nothing better to do on a Friday morning!

Thought experiment: Suppose Peter Schmidt had sat down at his computer and typed out similar sentences about demonstrators against police brutality in Cincinnati, noting their sloppy, shiftless dress and the fact that they evidently didn't have to be at work and hence were "well-positioned to devote time to a cause"? Would such sentences have passed editorial scrutiny at the Chronicle? And in the event (well nigh unimaginable) that such a description did appear in print, what sort of reaction could the Chronicle expect? How long would it take before a groveling public apology was issued?

Schmidt's opening is but the first move in a masterpiece of complacent bias and moral confusion. Consider to begin with the framing opposition between "science" and "politics." Suppose instead of fetal-tissue research we were talking about the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a study in "untreated syphilis in the Negro male" begun in 1932 and conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service for four decades. Would the moral objections that were finally raised against this grotesque abuse of "science" fall under the heading of "politics" as well?

Consider further Schmidt's idealized treatment of "award-winning neuroscientist, Howard E. Gendelman," who is overseeing the fetal-tissue studies at the University of Nebraska's Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disease. Schmidt goes to great lengths to paint Gendelman as morally sensitive. "One of the toughest moral questions that Dr. Gendelman still faces," Schmidt writes, "is one of complicity: In accepting fetal tissue from elective abortions, do he and his colleagues bear any moral responsibility for the procedures being done?"

Given the way opponents of the fetal-tissue research are ridiculed by Schmidt, we might expect that this was an easy call for the good Dr. Gendelman. Not at all: "That is something we have thought about, and thought about, and rethought about," Gendelman says. Moreover, we're told, "as an Orthodox Jew, he turned to rabbis for counsel." But if Gendelman arrived at the conviction that the research is justified only after a good deal of agonizing, isn't the opposition of those primly dressed retirees, that nun, and the rest of the Friday morning crowd quite understandable?

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45