Monday, October 26, 1998

Clones in the news
The news that the University of Georgia had hired Steve Stice--the researcher who made headlines last January for genetically engineering and then cloning two calves from fetal cells--was reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. According to the WSJ, a focus on the science of cloning is still uncommon for universities.
The WSJ quoted Clifton Baile, another UGA Eminent Scholar, as saying that the key motivation for cloning is to feed the world more cheaply and efficiently. Once scientists have created a meatier chicken or cow, they can replicate it through cloning. Baile, Stice and another partner have formed a company called OptiGen to spin out research for commercial uses.
Stice told the WSJ that within a few years he expects farmers to bring their best pigs and cattle to OptiGen for cloning. “We’re not changing these animals,” he said. “We’re just making more of them.”


Tug and pull of journalism
Food Lion is giving budding journalists an ethics lesson, sending 200 journalism schools around the country its own case study of ABC-TV’s 1992 undercover report on the supermarket’s foodhandling practices. The document, titled “Food Lion v. ABC: Fakes, Lies and Videotape,” employs testimony, video outtakes and depositions it says shows ABC’s purposeful deception. Some journalism professors are using the material, but others suggest it might be slanted, according to a report from the Associated Press.
UGA’s Conrad Fink, one of several professors of journalism or marketing contacted by AP, said the material can help foster a discussion of media ethics without misleading anyone. “My students are sophisticated enough to handle contentious material,” said Fink, author of the book Media Ethics. “Let them work it out, the way a journalist has to work out the tug and pull of any story he or she is examining.”



Teen shoppers
When it comes to back-to-school shopping, kids have a big say in deciding what to buy, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. That’s a switch, the newspaper says, from just a decade ago when parents did the shopping and kids wore what was bought.
For the retail industry, a new generation of teen shoppers with access to a lot of discretionary money means high stakes. The newspaper cites a retail report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at UGA’s Terry College of Business, which estimated that $455 billion would be spent this year during the back-to-school season, up 5.7 percent from last year.



Remembering an alumnus
UGA journalism alumnus John Holliman was remembered in a People magazine feature titled “Happy Warrior.” The TV journalist who covered the bombing of Baghdad live from a hotel room with CNN colleagues Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw died in a head-on collision in September, just two miles from his suburban Atlanta home. Walter Cronkite, with whom Holliman was scheduled to co-anchor coverage of John Glenn’s space flight this month, noted, “The principal thing that makes a good reporter is curiosity, and John had it to the nth degree.”

For more information about these items, contact news service director Sharron Hannon at
542-8083.
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