Abstract
We draw on William L. Benoit’s image repair theory to examine the case of Jesse Gelsinger, who died during a clinical trial testing the safety of a highly anticipated gene therapy treatment. We argue the primary biomedical researcher blamed for Gelsinger’s death used image repair strategies to frame his controversial research as a regrettable but important moment in the larger pursuit of frontier science in which he claimed to have acted humanely. We explain how health and medical professionals apologizing for biomedical tragedies risk demeaning the public they already harmed. Our study tries to account for image repair’s essential but contradictory role in dangerous frontier biomedicine, and we draw novel connections between image repair strategies and the rhetorical concepts of synecdoche and metonymy.