Costly Hoax?

Scientist sues over clone book

The author assures us it is true. We do not know." Despite this weak disclaimer, J.B. Lippincott Co. last March published In His Image as nonfiction. The book, though dull and error filled, stirred immediate controversy by claiming that a baby boy cloned from an eccentric aging millionaire (and thus his genetic duplicate), by a doctor named "Darwin," was alive and well. Had Lippincott checked with any of the reputable scientists quoted in the book or even with the editors in its own medical book division, it would have known that the story was probably fraudulent; experts agree that no mammal has yet been cloned. Instead, the publisher depended entirely on the word of Author David Rorvik, a little-known freelancer whose credentials include naive articles about psychics and faith healers, and newsletters supporting the quack cancer drug Laetrile.

Now notice has been served on Rorvik and Lippincott--and, indirectly, on other authors and publishers--that it may well be costly to print as fact books that are fictitious or, even worse, hoaxes. Charging that Rorvik and Lippincott have done just that, Oxford University Geneticist J. Derek Bromhall last week filed a $7 million libel suit against them. Bromhall, a respected scientist, notes that he would not have brought suit had Image been published as fiction. But as nonfiction, he says, the book has "defamed" him by quoting from his research "so as to create the impression that Bromhall was cooperating or in some way had helped and was vouching for the accuracy and credibility of the book." His suit, filed in U.S. district court in Philadelphia (Lippincott's headquarters), makes a further, and novel demand; it seeks a court order forcing the author and publisher to admit that the book is "a fraud and a hoax" and that "no cloned boy exists."

Bromhall says he first heard of Rorvik in May 1977, when the author wrote to him saying, "I am working on a new book and wish to discuss in it some of the prospects of mammalian cloning." Bromhall promptly replied with a nine-page abstract of his doctoral thesis on cloning. But when Image was published, Bromhall found to his great surprise that the birth of the cloned boy had supposedly occurred five months before the date of Rorvik's letter. "If Rorvik's story were true," says Bromhall, "then by the time he wrote to me, he and 'the Darwin team' knew more about human cloning than anyone in the world. Then why did he ask my advice? The whole thing is so obviously untrue. We just must not allow this sort of hoax to pass by."

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