Today drone pilots operate thousands of miles away from the battlefield. They must manage vast amounts of data and video images during exceptionally intense workdays. They are scrutinized by superiors for signs of stress, and to reduce such stress the Air Force is attempting shift changes, less physical isolation on the job, and more opportunities for rest.

Yet even as this remarkable new form of war fighting is becoming more widely recognized, there are at least two more possible technological transitions on the horizon that have garnered far less public attention. One is using brain-machine interface technologies to give the remote pilot instantaneous control of the drone through his or her thoughts alone. The technology is not science fiction: Brain-machine interface systems are already being used to help patients with paralytic conditions interact with their environments, like controlling a cursor on a computer screen.

In a military context, a well-trained operator, instead of using a joystick for very complicated equipment, may be able to process and transmit a command much more rapidly and accurately through a veritable mind-meld with the machine.

There are enormous technical challenges to overcome. For example, how sure can we be that the system is not interpreting a fantasy as an intention? Even if such an error were rare it could be deadly and not worth the risk.

Yet there is a way to avoid the errors of brain-machine interface that could change warfare in still more fundamental and unpredictable ways: autonomous weapons systems combining the qualities of human intelligence that neuroscience has helped us understand with burgeoning information and communications technologies.

Even now there are defensive weapons systems on U.S. naval ships that routinely operate on their own, but with human monitoring. A new automated weapons system has been deployed at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. This robot sentry is said to be the first that has integrated systems for surveillance, tracking, firing and voice-recognition. Reportedly it has an “automatic” mode that would allow it to fire without a human command, but that mode is not being used.

Robot warriors, proponents argue, would not be subject to the fatigue, fear and fury that often accompany the chaos of combat—emotions can result in accidental injuries to friends or even barbaric cruelties motivated by a thirst for revenge and a sense of power. Others say the proponents of robot warriors are naive: What would inhibit dictators or nonstate actors from developing robotic programs that ignored the laws of war?

Moreover, some security analysts already worry that remote control unacceptably lowers the bar for a technologically superior force to engage in conflict. And will their adversaries, frustrated by their lack of opportunity to confront an enemy in person, be more likely employ robotic terror attacks on soft targets in that enemy’s territory? Will this be the death knell of whatever ethos of honor remains in modern military conflict?

Another technology is even more radical. Neuroscientists and philosophers are exploring the parameters of “whole brain emulation,” which would involve uploading a mind from a brain into a non-biological substrate. It might be that Moore’s Law (the idea that computing capacity doubles about every two years) would have to persist for decades in order for a computer to be sufficiently powerful to receive an uploaded mind. Then again, the leap might come by means of the new science of quantum computing—machines that use atomic mechanical phenomena instead of transistors to manage vast amounts of information. Experiments with quantum computing are already being performed at a number of universities and national laboratories in the United States and elsewhere.

Robotic warriors whose computers are based on whole brain emulation raise a stark question: Would these devices even need human minders? Perhaps, if we’re not careful, these creatures could indeed inherit the Earth.

[...]

This article is excerpted from the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal Online subscribers can read the rest of the article here. A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Robot Soldiers Will Be a Reality—and a Threat.

Dr. Moreno is a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. He is the author of “Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century” (Bellevue, 2012). 

In a little-noticed announcement last fall, the PLA proclaimed that it has developed an anti-sleep pill called Night Eagle.  Apparently the putative communists/state capitalists haven’t mastered the Madison Avenue branding arts: “Night Eagle” seems better suited for an erectile dysfunction treatment than an aid for pulling all-nighters.  (Though one could imagine a functional connection.)

The little blue pill’s unveiling came as part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences’ 60^th anniversary celebration, but with no word on its ingredients.  Nonetheless, the formulation is almost certainly less revolutionary than it might seem within loyal party cadres.  In the U.S. a drug called modafinil (marketed as Provigil), has been around for decades, approved by the Food and Drug Administration as effective in the treatment of narcolepsy.  Controlled studies have shown that modafinil not only helps patients with sleep disorders but can keep people with normal sleep cycles awake and alert for days.  Physicians have long prescribed modafinil “off-label” for insomniacs, shift workers, long-haul truck drivers and travelers who have to cross time zones.  However, the risks of long-term use are unknown.  One would surely be ill-advised to routinely try to forego the body’s fundamental need for sleep.

Of course warfighters have good reason to seek help in staying awake.  Fatigue is a principle source of error in combat zones, where long periods of boredom are punctuated with seconds of chaos.  Extending the period of useful wakefulness among soldiers has long been a dream of military commanders.  The Prussian army experimented with cocaine (but then so did everyone else), and 20^th century armies have relied on nicotine, caffeine and, more recently, amphetamines.  A number of armed forces use modafinil, including the U.S., British and French.

Reading between the lines, the PLA’s pride in Night Eagle suggests a desire to demonstrate China’s capacity in pharmaceutical development.  However, The People’s Republic’s aggressive industrial policy is frequently accused of violating intellectual property rules by deconstructing and re-engineering products developed elsewhere. It happens that as of last month the generic drug giant Teva has been granted exclusive rights to modafinil, which has just gone off-patent, and the company is trying to capture part of the rapidly growing Chinese market for all medications.  Night Eagle might fly into competition with modafinil, and it is almost certainly a remarkably similar formula.

Of course, the great irony in all this is the urgency of the competitive relationship between the two countries, which might soon be battling over a sleep gap.  No less a prophet than Karl Marx himself would be surprised at the easy availability of sleep suppressants for the laboring classes.  Certainly his great work, Das Kapital, predicted no such thing even as it foretold the inevitable collapse of capitalism.

Workers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but a good night’s sleep!  And a world of wakefulness to win.

Jonathan D. Moreno is a the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics at The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and the editor-in-chief of Science Progress.This article was republished from Psychology Today with permission of the author.

What lesson can be gleaned from these seemingly disparate story lines? One is this: science is asking more precise questions but the answers are harder to get.

A core concept of the Enlightenment was that the more that reasoning is based on experimentation the more we can learn about the world. Manipulation of variables, recommended in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, proved to be a turning point in the history of science. By uncovering previously invisible truths and giving human beings novel and effective ways to manage their environment, the scientific method gave the idea of progress a whole new meaning. Until then it wasn’t at all clear that civilization wasn’t in some kind of steady state, or even that we weren’t in decline from some “golden age.” But it turned out that the golden age was still ahead of us, if we were smart enough to invest in it and wise enough not to misuse the knowledge being gained.

By the late 19th century, some philosophers theorized that, given enough time and money, the scientific community would be able to come up with a unified system of knowledge of the whole of reality. That end point may never actually come, of course, but it was the product of a thought experiment about the demonstrated power of actual experiments, a kind of ideal terminus of knowledge. Certainly the Darwinian revolution gave reason to believe this could be done in the biological world, and even today physicists are aiming for a unified theory of the cosmos.

But what we seem to be discovering is that, as we dig into the weeds of the nature of reality, reality is ever more stubborn about giving up its secrets. Nowhere is this recalcitrance more apparent than in genetics and neuroscience. The more we’ve learned about the human genome the more important proteins have turned out to be, and the more we’ve learned about brain cells the more we’ve realized how important the connections between brain cells are (something the philosopher and psychologist William James told us in 1890!).

In a way, we’ve already plucked much of the low-hanging fruit. Though it took tens of thousands of years to get on track, once we got there, we learned fast. How low-hanging the fruit of new knowledge is depends in part on how we approach it. We seem to be in a transitional period from a marvelously rich era of discovery in the last 30 years to an era in which new concepts and methods will be required to gain access to another range of powerful discoveries.

However, this transitional period is frustrating. Just to take the case of neurological disorders like autism, it’s quite clear that like cancer the conditions brought under that large rubric have diverse biological roots. A couple of years ago a well-known geneticist told me that he is sure Asperger’s Syndrome is genetically quite distinct from the spectrum of autism disorders, for example. So, again, it’s often the case that the next step gets harder and more expensive. At the same time, the external variables that can cause multiple genetic switches to be turned on and off are so numerous, subtle and hard to control that few disease risks can be confidently predicted. Even “designer babies” wouldn’t change that.

Now we come to the heart of the problem: the basic science is more promising than ever but the opportunities to monetize the value of that science are, for the moment at least, fewer than they were even 20 years ago. The headwinds into which investors must now sail are not simply due to easy answers like “over regulation” but reflect the nature of the science waiting to be done. America is out of the new supercollider business. The pharmaceutical pipeline is running dry, and especially in neurological disease the big players are leaving the field.

All is not lost. Government agencies like the National Institutes of Health are developing new models for data collection and empirical studies. Regulatory reforms are in process. Industry is looking to smaller and more flexible corporate arrangements. Gradually, drug testing will be liberated from the limitations of animal models by more in vitro processes, analytical devices will be improved and more powerful computers will develop superior algorithms.

But in an increasingly competitive international science marketplace, who will take the lead? For the United States’ future in medical research, this set of factors calls on a virtue that is not prominent in the American character: patience. Our famous “can do” attitude has tended to devolve to a “do it now” culture. Investors and corporate boards have come to expect annual, semi-annual, or even quarterly rewards. The political system—and perhaps crucially the national security science establishment—will have to play a key role in providing leadership and incentives to keep this country in the front ranks of discovery. As the nation that can most readily lay claim to be the child of the Enlightenment, this will be an especially provocative challenge.

And the answer is “both.” If we try.

Jonathan D. Moreno is a the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics at The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and the editor-in-chief of Science Progress.This article was republished from Psychology Today with permission of the author.

The findings of a recent survey confirm the argument of my book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, that America has entered a new and unprecedented era of politicized science. University of North Carolina health services researcher Gordon Gauchat has found that trust in science among American conservatives has plummeted since 1974. The issues that divide us are familiar. Among them are planetary and human origins, climate change and the remarkable advances of the new biology.

Importantly, Gauchat found that the lost confidence is found not only among self-identified conservatives with less education, but among “high information” conservatives as well. This result undermines the notion that the more people know about science, the more they trust its conclusions. In fact, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, people tend to select data that support their prior belief preferences. In his survey Gauchat found that more sophisticated conservatives appreciated the threats to their values posed by science (e.g., intensified government regulation) more than those who were less educated.

As Gauchat observes, if this trend persists the implications for science institutions could be dire. Both public funding of basic research and the use of evidence in policymaking are threatened by politicized science. Citing Chris Mooney‘s theory that the change in public attitudes began in the Reagan era and intensified under George W. Bush, Gauchat observes that until then most people identified science with the space race and moon landing, triumphs that gave science great cultural authority across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, as I’ve argued, historically American science policy has been closely aligned with the civic narrative of progress and the pushing back of frontiers: where Americans saw new worlds to conquer they’ve been enthusiastic about pioneering technologies: the telegraph, transcontinental railroad, telephone, vaccines, organ transplants, information technologies and spacecraft.

The obituary of the American frontier has been prematurely written before, starting at least with Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” of 1893. But with the close of the continent, the rise of China, and the uncertain future of space exploration it is hard to see where the next American frontier will lie. Well-intended but unsexy abstractions drawing on the “Sputnik” analogy, like energy independence, have not gotten modern Americans’ blood flowing.

And as science has become specialized it is harder to find an Edison or a Salk who inspires with a personal story. Post-Vietnam America allows for little heroic mythologizing, even of revered technology leaders like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

To make matters worse, in recent decades “experts” have come to be seen (and in fact often are) in charge of public policy. This is partly a result of the fact that modern society is so complicated and so dependent on science-based technologies that expertise is required to run them as never before. But conservatives who worry about threats to traditional values and encroaching government harbor doubts about the motivations and moral compass of scientists. Gauchat’s results square with those of the sociologist John Evans, who finds that it is not science in general or even the scientific method that is the ultimate object of mistrust, but rather scientists themselves.

The grounds for mistrust of science are found in the DNA of the Enlightenment itself. Francis Bacon is often credited as the first to articulate the modern idea of science, distinguishing between basic and applied research. In Bacon’s 17th century utopian tale The New Atlantis, the governors of Bensalem are scientists. But, as one of them explains to the shipwrecked visitors, not all of their knowledge is generally shared: “And this we do also: we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not; and take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret; though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.”

What is to be done? One answer is to change the conversation. The focus needs to be placed on what Bacon referred to as the fruits of science that can help achieve Enlightenment goals of human flourishing, the same goals that the American founders saw as keys to the prosperity of the new nation.

Another answer is to emphasize the activities of scientists that are publicly observable, concrete and transparent, activities that are often under the heading of engineering. This answer argues that, instead of looking to the space program as an analogy, we should focus on the modern version of the program itself. A manned Mars landing is controversial among many progressives and is far more difficult to achieve in every sense than many of us used to believe, but the implications of such a national commitment may redeem scientists themselves in all sorts of secondary ways.

As is well known, funding for NASA’s manned Mars mission has taken a hit in the 2012 budget. In truth, I have not been an advocate of a human mission. The risks to a human crew are (pun intended) astronomical and the benefits to scientific knowledge modest compared to a robotic mission. But there are some experiments that machines alone probably can’t do. And for a unified sense of national purpose, especially rescuing the public profile of scientists, there may be no other solution.

Of course, the financial obstacles are also extreme, especially in the current fiscal environment, when there are so many pressing human needs back on Earth. But for the future of America’s commitment to science, one that will eventually lift all boats, the manned Mars mission might appeal to another traditional American principle: pragmatism.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article is cross-posted in the Huffington Post.

National security organizations in the United States, including the armed services and the intelligence community, have developed a close relationship with the scientific establishment. The latest technology often fuels warfighting and counter-intelligence capacities, providing the tactical advantages thought necessary to maintain geopolitical dominance and national security. Neuroscience has emerged as a prominent focus within this milieu, annually receiving hundreds of millions of Department of Defense dollars. Its role in national security operations raises ethical issues that need to be addressed to ensure the pragmatic synthesis of ethical accountability and national security.

Introduction

During the past decade, the US national security establishment has come to see neuroscience as a promising and integral component of its 21st century needs. Much neuroscience is “dual use” research, asking questions and developing technologies that are of both military and civilian interest. Historically, dual use has often involved a trickle down of military technology into civilian hands. The Internet, for example, originated as a non-local, distributed means to secure military information. In the case of neuroscience, however, civilian research has outpaced that of the military. Both National Research Council (NRC) reports and Department of Defense (DoD) funding reveal ongoing national security interests in neuroscience and indicate that the military is quite eager to glean what it can from the emerging science [1],[2]. To pursue cognitive neuroscience research, the Pentagon’s science agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), received about US$240 million for the fiscal year of 2011, while the Army trails at US$55 million, the Navy at US$34 million, and the Air Force at US$24 million [3].

The military establishment’s interest in understanding, developing, and exploiting neuroscience generates a tension in its relationship with science: the goals of national security and the goals of science may conflict. The latter employs rigorous standards of validation in the expansion of knowledge, while the former depends on the most promising deployable solutions for the defense of the nation. As a result, the exciting potential of high-tech developments on the horizon may be overhyped, misunderstood, or worse: they could be deployed before sufficiently validated.

Current state-of-the-art neuroscience, including new forms of brain scanning, brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), and neuromodulation, is being tapped for warfighter enhancement, deception detection, and other cutting-edge military applications to serve national security interests.

Brain-computer interface

BCIs exemplify the dual use nature of neuroscience applications. BCIs convert neural activity into input for technological mechanisms, from communication devices to prosthetics. The military’s interests in BCIs are manifold, including treatment modalities, augmented systems for controlling vehicles, and assistance for detecting danger on the battlefield.

In the late 1990s, scientists demonstrated neurological control of the movement of a simple device in rats, and soon thereafter, of a robotic arm in monkeys [4]. More recently, a pilot study of BrainGate technology, an intracortical microelectrode array implanted in human subjects, confirmed 1,000 days of continuous, successful neurological control of a mouse cursor [5]. Non-invasive technologies for harnessing brain activity also show promise for human use. Progress has recently been reported on a “dry” EEG cap that does not require a gel to obtain sufficient data from the brain. The “brain cap” is reported to reconstruct movements of humans’ ankle, knee, and hip joints during treadmill walking in order to aid rehabilitation [6].

DARPA’s Augmented Cognition (AugCog) program sought to find ways to use neurological information gathered from warfighters to modify their equipment accordingly. For example, the “cognitive cockpit” concept involved recording a pilot’s brain activity to customize the cockpit to that individual’s needs in real time, from selecting the least burdened sensory organ for communicating information to prioritizing informational needs and eliminating distractions [7]. Although the Augmented Cognition moniker (and funding mechanism) seem to have been dropped, its spirit lives on in other DARPA projects. For example, the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System is developing portable binoculars that convert subconscious, neurological responses to danger into consciously available information [8]. Such a system could reduce the information-processing burden on warfighters, helping them to identify and respond to areas of interest in the visual field more quickly.

Via intracortical microstimulation (ICMS), a neurologically controlled prosthetic could send tactile information back to the brain in nearly real time, essentially creating a “brain-machine-brain interface” [9]. The technology underlying this concept is already evolving, and some researchers hope that optogenetics, which both enables “precise, millisecond control of specific neurons” and “eliminates most of the key problems with ICMS,” will ultimately supplant the ICMS for sensory feedback [9]. In addition to devising prosthetics that can supply sensory information to the brain, brain-machine-brain interfaces may directly modify neurological activity. Portable technologies like near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), for example, could detect deficiencies in a warfighter’s neurological processes and feed that information into a device utilizing in-helmet or in-vehicle transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to suppress or enhance individual brain functions [2].

Much of the technological evolution of warfare has introduced a distance between the parties involved. From the advent of firearms to airplanes, aerial bombs to remotely operated drones, the visceral reality of combat afforded by the physical proximity to one’s enemy has steadily eroded. In 2007, researchers taught a monkey to neurologically control a walking robot on the other side of the world by means of electrochemical measurements of motor cortical activity [9]. Considering this in light of the work on robotic tactile feedback, it is easy to imagine a new phase of warfare in which ground troops become obsolete.

Warfighter enhancement

The therapeutic paradigm of medical practice aims to heal and reduce suffering, to return the ill to a state of normal health. Yet, many interventions can be used by the healthy to enhance specific traits or capacities beyond the physiological or statistical norm [10]. For example, BCIs can operate prosthetics for therapeutic purposes, but they could also connect to orthotic exoskeletons that enhance strength and endurance. Similarly, therapeutic drugs like methylphenidate can help patients recover focus and attention, but they are also used, for example, by healthy college students looking to maximize academic performance [11]. Whether they do in fact improve performance is open to disagreement [11],[12]. Military pharmaceutical neuroenhancement came to the public’s attention in 2003 when “two American pilots accidentally killed four Canadian soldiers and injured eight others in Afghanistan” [13]. It turned out that the pilots had been taking Dexedrine, the amphetamine-based “go pills” often used to reduce the fatigue induced by long missions.

In 2008, a report for the US Army compared the effects of amphetamines with those of modafinil, a drug typically used and approved to treat narcolepsy, in combination with sleep-aiding drugs. Despite the controversy over “go pills”, the study found that for long-duration missions, both amphetamines and modafinil have statistically similar effects of reducing the cognitive decline associated with fatigue [14]. Other reports state that modafinil significantly outperforms methylphenidate for cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals, “especially on people undergoing sleep deprivation” [15]. Related research has investigated other ways to combat fatigue as well. Published in 2007, a DARPA-sponsored study showed that nasally administered orexin-A, a neuropeptide, restored the short-term memory of sleep-deprived monkeys [16].

In its 2009 report for the US Army, the NRC recommends that TMS should also be a part of further research on central nervous system fatigue [2]. Studies suggest that TMS can enhance a variety of neurological functions in healthy individuals, from mood and social cognition to working memory and learning [17]. Another noninvasive neuromodulation technology, transcranial pulsed ultrasound, was demonstrated to have a number of promising effects, from being “useful for sonoporation in gene therapy” to “promoting nerve regeneration” [18]. With the aid of both DARPA and US Army funding, researchers envision and work toward developing portable, in-helmet ultrasound transducers capable of stimulating neural circuits with a better precision and depth than TMS [19]. Direct current polarization, or transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), is another noninvasive, DARPA-supported technology for neuromodulation. “As might be expected, TDCS can enhance cognitive processes occurring in targeted brain areas” [20], including learning and memory [17].

While cognitive augmentation will enhance performance on some tasks, other situations call for the reduction of neurological capacity. For example, if a memory of a traumatic event could be dampened, one may be less likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. In 2002, scientists produced preliminary evidence that propranolol, when administered shortly after a traumatic event, could mitigate the long-term potential for internal cues to invoke post-traumatic stress [21]. More recently, scientists demonstrated that propranolol can similarly reduce PTSD symptoms when administered “after retrieval of the memory of a past traumatic event”, not just immediately after the event itself [22].

Human enhancement may benefit individuals and society in myriad ways, but it also poses many risks. In the civilian world, if more and more people begin enhancing their minds and bodies, individuals may eventually feel subtly coerced into enhancing themselves in order to remain competitive in school or the workplace [10]. In the military context, the risk of coercion is much more pronounced [13]:

According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, soldiers are required to accept medical interventions that make them fit for duty. Experimental treatments are a harder case, but the US government has shown a tendency to defer to commanders in a combat situation if they think some treatment is likely to do more harm than good, even if unproven.

If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control, then the ethical implications are immense. As Peter W. Singer has observed, “the Pentagon’s real-world record with things like the aboveground testing of atomic bombs, Agent Orange, and Gulf War syndrome certainly doesn’t inspire the greatest confidence among the first generation of soldiers involved [in human enhancement]” [23].

Neuroscientific deception, detection, and interrogation

National security agencies are also mining neuroscience for ways to advance interrogation methods and the detection of deception. The increasing sophistication of brain-reading neurotechnologies has led many to investigate their potential applications for lie detection. Deception has long been associated with empirically measurable correlates, arguably originating nearly a century ago with research into blood pressure [24]. Yet blood pressure, among other modern bases for polygraphy like heart and breathing rates, indicates the presence of a proxy for deception: stress. Although the polygraph performs better than chance, it does not reliably and accurately indicate the presence of deception, and it is susceptible to counter measures. Because of these problems with the polygraph, researchers are eagerly following up on preliminary successes in using new neurotechnological modalities for detecting deception.

“Brain fingerprinting” utilizes EEG to detect the P300 wave, an event-related potential (ERP) associated with the perception of a recognized, meaningful stimulus, and it is thought to hold potential for confirming the presence of “concealed information” [25]. The technology is marketed for a number of uses: “national security, medical diagnostics, advertising, insurance fraud and in the criminal justice system” [26]. Similarly, fMRI-based lie detection services are currently offered by several companies, including No Lie MRI [27] and Cephos [28]. DARPA funded the pioneering research that showed how deception involves a more complex array of neurological processes than truth-telling, and that fMRI arguably can detect the difference between the two [29]. No Lie MRI also has ties to national security: they market their services to the DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, among other potential customers [30].

The Defense Intelligency Agency (DIA)-commissioned 2008 NRC report, Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, in which one of the present authors (JDM) participated, reiterates the conclusion of a 2003 NRC report [31] that “traditional measures of deception detection technology have proven to be insufficiently accurate” [1]. While the NRC ultimately recommends pursuing “research on multimodal methodological approaches for detecting and measuring neurophysiological indicators of psychological states and intentions”, it cautions that like traditional polygraphy, neurological measurements do not directly reveal psychological states [1]. In fact, many scholars and scientists dispute the validity of brain scan-based lie detection [24],[32].

In addition to questions of scientific validity, these technologies raise legal and ethical issues. Legally required brain scans arguably violate “the guarantee against self-incrimination” because they differ from acceptable forms of bodily evidence, such as fingerprints or blood samples, in an important way: they are not simply physical, hard evidence, but evidence that is intimately linked to the defendant’s mind [32]. Under US law, brain-scanning technologies might also raise implications for the Fourth Amendment, calling into question whether they constitute an unreasonable search and seizure [33].

Another neuroscientific field stimulating national security interest pertains to the hormone oxytocin, which has been shown to augment the expression of various virtues, from “trust and trustworthiness” to “generosity and sacrifice” [34]. Without elaborating, the NRC’s 2008 report specifies oxytocin as a “neuropeptide of interest” [1]. If the interest in question relates to pharmacologically incapacitating the psychological defenses of interrogation suspects, this may conflict with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). According to the CWC, a chemical that can cause “temporary incapacitation” is defined as a “toxic chemical” and is therefore banned from such use [35]. Beyond this ethical concern, oxytocin is far from being confirmed as a truth serum, and without further verification it should not be treated as such. The history of research on finding the ultimate truth serum is long and storied. Suffice it to say, “[T]he urban myth of the drugged detainee imparting pristine nuggets of intelligence is firmly rooted and hard to dispel” [36].

Recommendations

This paper has detailed the national security establishment’s interest in and ability to fund a panoply of diverse neuroscientific studies. It has also reviewed the ethical, legal, and social issues that emerge from this relationship. Yet, discussions in themselves will not ensure that the translation of basic science into deployed product will proceed ethically or contribute to the greater good. These considerations must be embedded and explored at various levels in society: upstream in the minds and goals of scientists, downstream in the creation of advisory bodies, and broadly in the public at large.

Although they may receive funding from national security agencies, neuroscientists may not consider how their work contributes to warfare. As we have seen, however, neuroscience does, and will continue to, play a role in military operations. This fact spawns a plenitude of ethical concerns, from which one may surmise that the sciences should divorce themselves from the military completely. However, the fact that the material explored in this paper is public information speaks to the possibility that a discussion about the role and limits of neuroscience in national security may be open and transparent. Bifurcating public science from national security may only drive the same research underground, undermining its current public accountability [13]. Thus, it would be impractical to try to circumvent the ethical problems simply by cutting ties between science and national defense.

Many would agree with George Mason University anthropologist Hugh Gusterson that “[m]ost rational human beings would believe that if we could have a world where nobody does military neuroscience, we’ll all be better off. But for some people in the Pentagon, it’s too delicious to ignore” [37]. In any case, as we have suggested, the dual use possibilities for neuroscience render such a world unlikely. Therefore, scientists themselves could become more aware of the dual use phenomenon, whether their work is specifically funded by national security bodies or not, in order to create a more self-conscious scientific enterprise. They could also involve themselves in constructing the parameters to guide and govern their relationships with national security agencies. Just as many nuclear scientists opposed the development of atomic weapons, contributing to the test-ban treaties of the 1960s and the drawdown of armed missiles in the 1980s [13], neuroscientists could consider and promulgate their perspectives on the military implications and ethical issues associated with their work.

This article was originally published in PloSBiology, and should be cited as “Tennison MN , Moreno JD (2012) Neuroscience, Ethics, and National Security: The State of the Art. PLoS Biol 10(3): e1001289. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001289″

Endnotes

1. Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Research in the Next Two Decades, National Research Council of the National Academies (2008) Emerging cognitive neuroscience and related technologies. Washington (D.C.): National Academies Press. 214 p.
2. Committee on Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, National Research Council of the National Academies (2009) Opportunities in neuroscience for future army applications. Washington (D.C.): National Academies Press. 136 p.
3. Kosal M. E, Huang J. Y (2011) Security implications of cognitive neuroscience research: Results from an ethnographic survey of researchers. Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security. London: The Royal Society.
4.Lebedev M. A, Nicolelis M. A. L (2006) Brain-machine interfaces: past, present and future. Trends Neurosci 29(9): 536–546. Find this article online
5. Simeral J. D, Kim S. P, Black M. J, Donoghue J. P, Hochberg L. R (2011) Neural control of cursor trajectory and click by a human with tetraplegia 1000 days after implant of an intracortical microelectrode array. J Neural Eng 8: 1–24. Find this article online
6. Presacco A, Goodman R, Forrester L. W, Contreras-Vidal J. L (2011) Neural decoding of treadmill walking from non-invasive, electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. J Neurophysiol 106: 1875–1887. Find this article online
7. Keiper A (2006) The age of neuroelectronics. New Atlantis 11: 4–41. Find this article online
8. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Sciences OfficeCognitive technology threat warning system. Available: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Cognitive_Technology_Threat_Warning_System_(CT2WS).aspx. Accessed 15 July 2011.
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A far too common error of commentary on Brave New World and its ilk is to receive them as “prophecy.” This error is even perpetuated by the writers themselves who like Huxley, live long enough to look back, as in his truly grim, and what is worse, far less lyrical 1958 essay, “Brave New World Revisited,” proving that the author is as liable to the sin of retrospection that tarnishes the original work as anyone else.

Not a prediction in the pre-scientific prophetic tradition, Brave New World is a kind of evidence-based thought experiment: considering where we are now, where might we go? Dystopically but realistically speaking, how bad might it get? As I argue in my new book, The Body Politic, this is a key question in America’s culture wars.

Nor is Brave New World a futurist fantasy like a few of those of H.G. Wells who, in his remarkably long and prolific career, produced dozens of works. Some of Wells’ novels relied on devices that systematically defied contemporary science, like anti-gravity devices, or even logical possibility, like time travel. By contrast, in Brave New World Huxley stuck close to what was then known about Mendelian genetics, and his eugenically modified humans owed much to the timely introduction of chemicals like alcohol during fetal development.

Writing 20 years before Watson and Crick decoded the human genome and 40 years before recombinant DNA technology, Huxley did not have at his disposal the far more specific modifications made feasible by modern genetics. The chemical industry was, after all, far better developed in 1932 than was genetics, and what was supposed to be hereditary alcoholism was then a rationale for policies that attempted to weed out the “lesser types “.

Again, unlike the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis or the “high fantasist” J.R.R. Tolkien, Huxley was not a mythologist or a romantic Medievalist who depreciated the Renaissance. For Huxley there was no turning back from the scientific revolution, in spite of the attendant risks of dehumanization, especially when combined with the characteristic malady of the 19th century nation-state: totalitarianism. Rather, his longing for solace amid modernity took the form of psychical research and experiments with mescaline and LSD, part of his quest for an expanded consciousness beyond both science and Western religion. In this part of his life, explored in The Doors of Perception, Huxley’s ripples reached far and wide, including inspiring a young Timothy Leary fresh from Mexico with a suitcase full of mushrooms.

Besides eugenics, the happiness drug “soma” is the other technology most identified with Brave New World. But on re-reading the novel one is struck that a far more accessible, low-tech preoccupation is key to the order and stability of the 26th century: sex. In the London of 2540 virtually everyone is expected, and indeed virtually required, to engage in Bonobo-like promiscuous coupling. (Perhaps certain modern politicians and celebrities are in an advanced state of evolution, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.)

“Freemartins” (a decidedly unromantic term normally applied to masculinized female cattle), are sterile women who are therefore especially available. Again, as a man of his time who was au fait with the available technology, and as the younger brother of eugenicist Julian, Huxley knew plenty about sterilization but did not anticipate The Pill. The central character of Brave New World, and the only one who rejected sex without love, is “John the Savage,” a state-of-nature creature who, having no place in either society or the wild, would have met the requirements of neither Hobbes nor Rousseau.

Brave New World remains a success not because of what it literally foretells. Indeed, as prediction the novel is a flop. Like virtually every other science fiction novel before the 1970s it totally missed the information revolution (though an argument might be made for H.G. Wells in The World Brain, 1938), and recent remarkable advances in neuroscience, for example, not to mention their combination in implantable brain chips (see my book Mind Wars for more on national security interest in neuroscience). It anticipated cloning for reproduction but not for therapy. An artificial placenta, the key to the “ectogenesis” performed in the Central London Hatchery, has proven surprisingly difficult to develop, even in an era of prenatal diagnosis, fetal surgery and intensive care nurseries, and incidentally would require grossly unethical experiments.

Rather, where Brave New World shines, and what makes it so fresh even beyond the biblical four-score-and-ten, is what it says about being human in any age: the longing for love and for a society that makes us feel truly human.

(I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Mark Adams for deepening my appreciation of Brave New World.)

Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at American Progress, and Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress. This article is reposted from the Huffington Post technology page.

That was 1999, and the book was a translation of a 1992 work by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, called Risk Society. One of Beck’s key premises is that the modern world is typified by the exportation of risk. His examples include the industrial disaster in Bhopal, India, in which thousands of people died from a gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant. Doing a little background work on Beck, I came to understand that his ideas were hugely influential in Europe, especially among advocates of the “precautionary principle” who would put the burden of proof on claims that no harm will be caused by an action or policy.

With some exceptions, the idea of managing risks proactively and proportionately, let alone embracing the precautionary principle, hasn’t caught on here as it has in Europe. In the U.S., technological risk management has been seen as too much government intrusion that threatens innovation. Instead, as Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff has observed, the American approach has been to “normalize” new technologies like certain genetic manipulations as merely extensions of what already happens in nature.

But that approach can put a lot of weight on distinguishing between genuinely new wrinkles and what’s been done before, and it doesn’t help sort out high- and low-risk products. So for genuinely innovative technologies that cannot plausibly be lumped as minor variants of existing and proven technologies, there is little choice but to bear the brunt of the full force of the U.S. regulatory hammer. Instead of restraining government oversight, the result is often sweeping and unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles to innovation that aren’t well-matched to actual threats. The case I know best is that of human experiments, which are overseen by the same process, whether they are pen-and-pencil surveys or phase-one cancer trials.

Happily, albeit with little notice, the way the federal government regulates the risks of innovative science and technology is undergoing substantial change, one that started in the George W. Bush years and is gaining momentum under Barack Obama. The challenge is to reshape the regulatory philosophy of the 20th century to fit 21st-century research and development. Rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of the post-World-War-II era, government is trying to fit the oversight of emerging technologies — such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology and genetic engineering — to their risks.

What’s intriguing about this shift is that the idea of managing technological risk has not only been quietly embraced by both parties and across ideological lines, but it crosses over many and diverse scientific and technological fields. Last March the White House told federal agency heads that “regulation and oversight should avoid unjustifiably inhibiting innovation, stigmatizing new technologies, or creating trade barriers.” The statement by several presidential office heads emphasized principles like scientific integrity, public participation, benefits and costs of federal oversight, communication, flexibility, risk assessment, and risk management.

Take the case of nanotech. The last three presidential administrations have supported a National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) that has invested $14 billion in research since 2001 to speed the development of materials and devices with novel and valuable electronic, chemical, mechanical, and optical properties. At the same time, however — recognizing that public and business confidence in nano products could be threatened without good evidence of safety–the federal government, at the urging of the president’s science advisors, significantly increased research on the health and environmental implications of nanotechnology. The idea is to gain information while an industry is still young to avoid unnecessary, knee-jerk, and obstructive regulation later on. Along the same lines, in December the administration announced that it will develop a National Bioeconomy Blueprint, including “regulatory reforms that will reduce unnecessary burdens and impediments while protecting health and safety.” In another example, the human research oversight system is now being revised to concentrate oversight resources on the riskiest studies.

All this is a good start toward replacing a one-size-fits-all regulatory philosophy with one that focuses on evidence-based risk. So far, though, an important potential problem has been underappreciated by planners as they’ve sought to predict on the basis of solid science the actual risk posed by various new technologies: the threat that emerging technologies like nano or synthetic biology could have illicit “dual use” by terrorist groups. A single documented biological attack using new technology could result in a huge blowback that would undermine investment and public trust for years, a consequence that the then-nascent field of gene therapy research suffered after the death of a clinical trial subject in 1999.

The dual use problem came up just a few weeks ago at the end of 2011, when bird flu experiments aimed at bolstering public health efforts raised concerns for the virus’ potential misuse by bioterrorists. Of course, not all risks can be anticipated, but we can surely learn from our mistakes. As the president’s bioethics commission concluded in its synthetic biology report in 2010, “risk assessment activities across the government need to be coordinated and field release permitted only after reasonable risk assessment.” Coordinated risk regulation in advance of product development would encourage America’s innovators to more aggressively explore low-risk/high-potential-value terrain while freeing up resources to move dual use oversight into the 21st century.

Jonathan Moreno is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress. This article is reposted from the Huffington Post technology page.

Here are some examples of S&T budgeting that give a flavor of short-term ups and downs.

Increases over 2011 appropriations were claimed by the Department of Energy’s research wing ARPA-E, which receives $275 million, up from $180 million last year. Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs receive $1.8 billion, 1.6 percent above ’11. These are all far short of the president’s requests but still not horrible The DOE’s Office of Science gets a one percent increase at $4.9 billion, and Basic Energy Sciences within the office receives $1.7 billion, a small increase.

The National Institutes of Health budget will make some medical school deans breathe a modest sigh of relief. They received $30.7 billion in appropriations, $300 million or 1 percent above the amount in 2011, resulting in the same level of grants funded as last year. Included for NIH is $576 million specifically for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), allowing NCATS to begin its work. Simultaneously, as proposed by NIH, the National Center for Research Resources is de-authorized and many of its programs moved to NCATS.

Important efforts to keep track of Mother Earth took a few hits. The Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey receives $1.07 billion, $14 million below the 2011 enacted level. The 40-year old remote land sensing project called Landsat is stuck in the mud, though, as the USGS didn’t receive the increase requested to begin the next phase, which would have provided images to advance research on agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, and global change. Along these lines, Science and Technology in the Environmental Protection Administration was funded at $795 million, $18 million below 2011. The cut came mostly from air and climate change research. And a renewal of an old provision requires the President to submit a report on all Federal climate change spending within 120 days. One may read here a worrisome attitude between the lines.

In keeping with skepticism about the Department of Education’s Race to the Top, that program is cut by more than 20 percent from $698 million in 2011 down to $550 million in 2013. Congress would not provide funding for the president’s ARPA-ED and 100,000 STEM teachers proposals.

Reflecting changing national security priorities and perhaps some continuing reservations about the organization of the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate receives only $688 million, well below $828 million enacted in 2011 and a $1.2 billion 2012 Budget request. S&T fared better in the Defense Department, with $12.4 billion and so well above the 2012 Budget. But the Pentagon’s cutting edge science agency, DARPA, never a big-budget outfit, gets reduced by $160 million down to $2.8 billion, affecting portfolios across the board.

Though these are only some of the numbers, they give a sense of the continuing problem of public investment in long-term science and technology, at the same time that over two trillion dollars in venture capital is waiting in the wings. The defense authorization bill awaiting the president’s signature includes a smart and long overdue gesture toward leveraging small businesses that happen to have venture capital: National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs may give up to 25 percent of their SBIR funds to majority venture capital-owned businesses. Other federal agencies are authorized to award up to 15 percent. The willingness to allow a combine of venture capital with small business grants should help some companies over the “valley of death” that too often impedes a good idea from getting into the marketplace.

When money is tight more creativity is needed. As many have observed, and as the founders wished, immigration policies that encourage skilled and energetic young people to become Americans built the country. Today’s odious currents of xenophobia and nativism are nothing new to America, but neither is the determination to overcome them. Whether our generation rises to the challenge of putting this piece of a new American century into place is an open question.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article is cross-posted in Huffpo’s new science section.

A good illustration of this truism is the unanimous recommendation by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) that two leading journals not publish certain details about experiments with a version of the H5N1 virus, also known as “bird flu.”

The board’s concern is that the information about the experiments, which involved genetic mutations that made the virus much more virulent than the versions seen in nature, could lead to a bioterror weapon. But the reaction by the editors of the journals Nature and Science to the proposed de facto censorship of research results was, as described by a Washington Post report, “chilly.” An expert not on the NSABB was quoted as saying that that the recommendation was “ridiculous” because the risks the results present to humans are remote.

The board’s recommendation doesn’t go directly to the journal publishers, scientists or their institutions (one is the University of Wisconsin, the other in The Netherlands), but to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which in turn can only urge the journals to withhold information. One sticking point that gives the U.S. government leverage is that the research in both institutions was apparently done using federal funds. But the U.S. surely doesn’t want to look like it’s trying to keep the data to itself.

Beyond these short-term calculations, the incident reveals a deep philosophical divide about biological research that could threaten national security and public health, one that I have observed for years as an unpaid advisor to several government agencies including the NSABB (but not having to do with the current studies): How risk-averse should the life sciences community be in an era of asymmetric warfare? In the twentieth century nation-states found biological weapons to be pretty useless and unmanageable, but non-state actors and rogue states might still find them of interest.

Unlike physicists, whose modern discipline grew up in an atmosphere of the deepest possible relevance to national security during World War II, the culture of life scientists is not so woven in with security concerns. An interesting exception was scientists’ self-imposed mid-1970s moratorium on recombinant DNA research, but that didn’t last very long and didn’t involve terrorism fears but rather environmental risks. Obviously that has changed somewhat since the October 2011 anthrax attacks, but international treaties have imposed successful prohibitions on novel development of biological weapons (BW) since 1970. The most extensive effort to develop innovative BW was the secret and illegal Soviet program that continued right up to the end of the cold war. Further complicating the picture is the fact that quite a bit of funding for biology has resulted from post-9/11 worries, particularly in the form of secured laboratories for research on potentially dangerous pathogens.

Still, the default position of biologists is usually that more publicity is protective rather than threatening, that in the long run secrecy works against security rather than for it. Published results, it is generally thought, will help the scientific community and responsible authorities prepare for threats that might be posed by new knowledge well in advance of any actual attempts to use them.

Aiming at a compromise, before accepting the NSABB recommendations the two journals have asked for detailed plans from government that would enable “responsible scientists” to have access to the experiments’ details. How such a program would operate, especially in the hotbed of shared information created by the Internet, is not at all clear. What is clear is that the biological science community is very far from adopting anything like a “prudential principle” that would put the burden of proof on those who say there is no risk to a new source of knowledge.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress. This article is cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

Science Progress Editor-In-Chief Jonathan D. Moreno, in a Huffington Post cross-post.

When the politics of biology rears its head all bets are off.

As I argue in my new book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, we are in the midst of a new biopolitics in which the power of science confounds the usual left-right spectrum of public policy, one that by no means favors one side or the other. Witness Governor Rick Perry’s awkward defense of his executive order on the HPV vaccine and the rush to defend his policy (if not the governor himself), by women’s health advocacy groups.

Now comes the firestorm over Plan B (the so-called “morning after pill”)

These days the left and the right approach politically desirable science policy in somewhat different ways. The right’s approach is to use evidence when it’s available (or if someone can be found who appears to qualify as an “expert”), but quite willing to default to traditional values and to be explicit in doing so. The left’s approach to a desired political outcome when science is involved is to deny that there is a conflict with evidence and engage in a search for facts to support the wanted theory.

The decision to deny over-the-counter-access to Plan B is particularly awkward for an administration that early on pledged to “base our public policies on the soundest science,” and to be “open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions.”

Whatever its political wisdom of foolishness, the administration’s Plan B decision qualifies as a theory in search of the facts. For example, in her statement overruling the Food and Drug Administration (a remarkable event in itself), DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated that young girls might not understand the consequences of using Plan B. Yet evidence that reached precisely the opposite conclusion was instrumental in the FDA’s approval recommendation.

As to the sort of expert opinion so valued on the left, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine all “denounced” the HHS’s decision.

Cynics will ask, why should science be different? As in business, finance, sports, entertainment and all fields of human endeavor there is always politics. In general that is a good thing, since the only alternative to politics as a way to settle our differences is violence.

Nonetheless, one feature of modernity is the intuitive sense that somehow science should be different. The value of evidence and public demonstration through experimentation is a hard-won Enlightenment principle that, seen through the 200,000-year lens of human history, occurred to us just moments ago. Considering the blood, sweat and tears that took us to this point, cynicism about science and politics is cheap and lazy.

In the short run there’s still a political element when policy decisions are being made, but in the long run the scientific method does make science unique. Our task is to defend the science even — and especially — from those who claim to be its friends.

So how is the country doing in biotech investment? A fascinating and richly detailed new industry report from Jones Lang Lasalle allows us to reach two salient conclusions: first, the United States is holding its own as the global leader; and second, since the 2007 downturn, industry clusters in China, India, and Singapore have displaced traditional powers Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Spain in direct pharmaceutical investment.

This result confirms the narrative we hear in so many fields these days about the turn toward Asia, and well justifies the Obama administration’s reassertion of American interests as a Pacific power.

Digging deeper into the U.S. data, what is striking is the opportunities for development in so much of the country, which is currently dominated by a few regions at the top. According to the report’s ranking system, the top three regional biotech “clusters” are Boston, New York/New Jersey, and the Bay Area. But while it’s pretty clear that clusters in the Northeast and California dominate the biotech industry today, at the same time emerging clusters across the South and Midwest–Atlanta to Denver to Indianapolis to Houston–could have tremendous potential with the right policies and investments. As the report notes:

Some clusters, like Chicago and Houston, have very strong intellectual capacities and research institutions, but struggle to translate innovation from bench to marketplace due to lacking fiscal support or programming. While others, like Florida, Minneapolis and Indianapolis, have strong industry representation but remain challenged by fragmented framework, most notably lackluster funding from NIH and VC sources.

So policy frameworks do make a difference in regional success or failure. The online science policy journal I edit for the Center for American Progress, Science Progress, has long advocated for the value of investing in regional economic clusters as way to accelerate innovation and create jobs. Political candidates should take note that emerging clusters abroad are taking advantage of government policies that make them more competitive in high technology, especially India, China, Singapore, and Brazil. So while the last few years have shown U.S. resilience, there’s no time for complacency. In my new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, I argue that biotechnology needs to become part of the American narrative of progress and innovation. Creating incentives and programs to help level the playing field for nascent innovation clusters across the country would make America more competitive in the face of the emerging clusters abroad.

And a candidate who addresses those regional potentials might just strike a responsive chord that translates into votes.

Science Progress Editor-In-Chief, Jonathan Moreno, in a Huffington Post cross-post.

Why do we have trouble defining what a “person” is? The answer may lie in human evolutionary antiquity.

Recent efforts by radical pro-life conservatives to establish a definition of personhood that specifically includes the embryo at the moment of conception have failed both in at least three ways. First, they have been rejected by voters in Colorado (twice) and Mississippi. Second, they have failed to win the hearts and minds of most cultural conservatives themselves, with even respected leaders like outgoing Mississippi Haley Barbour withholding an enthusiastic endorsement. Third, moderate voters worried about the implications for contraception and fertility treatments. The Mississippi initiative defined a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.”

The ambiguous language of “humans”, “human beings” and “persons” is too rarely noticed as a key factor in the ways that people talk past each other. Progressives might blanch at the intuitive implications of calling a human embryo a human being, but (as a leading conservative intellectual pointed out to me years ago), it is surely not a non-human being. Conversely, conservatives worry about the arbitrariness of “person” or “personhood” that could result in dehumanizing those with impaired cognition (like Terri Schiavo), or those who don’t measure up based on some racial or other social prejudice, or of course embryos. For them the term might also be too inclusive, as it might apply to our higher primate relatives or perhaps someday to super-intelligent machines with self-awareness.

Is the idea of personhood like pornography? Do we know it when we see it? As the neuroscientists Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein put it in a 2007 paper, “personhood is a concept that everyone feels they understand but no one can satisfactorily define.”

Farah and Heberlein note that there is evidence our brains are “hard-wired” to distinguish between persons and non-persons. They cite a rare condition called prosopagnosia. People with this disorder cannot recognize a human face, yet some of them can still recognize an animal face. Brain imaging has even given evidence that there is a specific brain region, called the fusiform gyrus, for human face recognition. Other experiments show that the sight of human bodies themselves, even with the faces obscured, is associated with the activation of the fusiform gyrus and another brain region. Another brain area is active when actions are perceived to be intentional and still another when we just think about someone else’s mental state; in other words, when we think about someone else thinking.

So it seems evolution has set us up to see the world as divided between persons and non-persons. But here’s the problem: we evolved in a world in which we rarely encountered ambiguous cases. As Farah and Heberlein wrote in 2007, during 200,000 years of hunting and gathering, “Sonograms did not show us our fetuses; people did not live long enough to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and vegetative states were fatal. ” They continue:

It is interesting that infants and young children may be the one class of ambiguous cases that our ancestors did encounter on a regular basis, and for these cases it would be adaptive to attribute personhood even in the absence of intelligence and self-awareness. Protohumans who accurately judged their offspring to be lacking in the various traits associated with personhood and accordingly treated them as non-persons would not have many surviving descendents!

It seems that the neuroscientific and evolutionary evidence for a hard-wired but increasingly dysfunctional idea of personhood is compelling (and of course one can accept the neuroscience data without accepting the evolutionary explanation).

In The Body Politic I argue that this kind of disconcerting boundary-erasure is one of the reasons that the new biology, including neuroscience, has stimulated a new biopolitical era. The advocacy group Personhood USA is not giving up, with efforts like the failed Colorado and Mississippi ongoing in other states. And presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has reportedly advocated a federal law that would define a person as present at conception. Although Personhood USA blames Planned Parenthood and the radical left for its defeats, the fact is that the vast majority of voters in a culturally conservative Southern state rejected their campaign.

The possibility that people are giving the matter deeper thought than simply following a convenient ideological line is encouraging. The problem of personhood is even deeper than gaining agreement about the beginning of life. The challenge it presents is the beginning of wisdom, one for which evolution has, we may hope, also prepared us.

Mississippi’s Initiative 26 and other such “personhood” efforts in several states are intended to target abortion services but they could also be interpreted to limit access to contraception (if they are seen as embryo-destructive), in vitro fertilization (which often involves the creation of more embryos than are used), and human embryonic stem cell research (which requires the destruction of a human embryo).

There is other evidence that, unlike the George W. Bush years, the culture wars around the life sciences have moved to the state level, which makes these incidents harder to track than when they are in the high profile of national politics. For example, in my experience hardly any scientists are aware that more than two years ago Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) signed into law a bill that prohibits the creation of “human-animal hybrids” in the state. Similar legislative activity is brewing in other states.

Notably, these efforts have more momentum in states that are not leaders in cutting-edge biology. A personhood initiative has failed twice in Colorado, where the biosciences industry is thriving, though one can be sure that the Mississippi movement will not be the last.
Those of us who oppose these measures tend to interpret them not only as threats to women’s reproductive health and rights but also as attacks on science. As I point out in my new book, The Body Politic, however, the advocacy groups behind these well-organized initiatives also like to claim the mantle of science. The director of Personhood USA has been reported as asserting that “The unborn child in the womb is scientifically proven to be a human being.” The question is not whether single-celled human embryos are human, but whether they are persons–an issue that is elided in this statement.

Nonetheless, one wonders if these groups’ enthusiasm for “scientific proof” will extend to human embryonic stem cell research. Consistency demands nothing less.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. His new book, The Body Politic, examines the battle over science in America.

Jonathan Moreno’s new book,

Ten years ago, a series of anthrax attacks throughout the country followed hard on the heels of 9/11. The deadly powder made its way through the postal system – including several sent to Senate offices — ultimately claiming five victims. The nation was alerted as never before to yet another threat to national security. Suddenly words like biopreparedness and Cipro were on everyone’s lips.

How much have we learned about biodefense in the last decade? Is America more prepared for a biological weapons attack, or even a pandemic, than it was during that frightening October 2001? In the last few weeks, Hollywood has chimed in with a film, “Contagion,” that plays out the worst possible scenario.

The good news is that there are reasons to be reassured about our preparedness. The bad news is that we are in danger of backsliding.

Whether the source of a pandemic disease is natural or political, the first line of defense has to be medical. Our system for developing, storing and disseminating needed medications is inadequate. Not only do we lack a rich supply of antibiotics and vaccines for recognized threats, scientists worry that new biotechnologies designed to save lives could be diverted to the creation of organisms resistant to our current defenses.

In 2004, Congress passed a law called BioShield, intended to encourage private companies to begin developing new medicines that are both safer and more effective to address biological threats. The usual market incentives don’t necessarily apply when government is the only customer. Industry worries about the legal liabilities of large-scale distribution of medications that may have risky side-effects, like the smallpox vaccine.

BioShield was a good concept — but the results have been mixed at best. Some ideas that researchers thought could be promising have been failures. Worried about BioShield’s ability to take promising scientific findings into development, in 2006 Congress created the Biodefense Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, and placed it under the control the Department of Health and Human Services. But Congress has been chipping away at the BioShield funds.

For all the importance of new medications, we have over-emphasized the “high tech” side of biopreparedness. Again, because the first response to an event would require public health assets, regardless of whether the sources were natural or man-made terrorism, we need to focus on the capacity of public health departments.

But these state- and county-level agencies are often understaffed and under-resourced. Coordination between agencies is frequently inadequate. Microbes don’t respect state boundaries — so any failure of cooperation and communication could be deadly.

The Trust for America’s Health provides a biennial report card for state biopreparedness. Their 2010 report concludes that, over the past 10 years, most states have improved their readiness to prevent, identify and contain public health threats. However, “Ready or Not” also notes that 33 states and the District of Columbia have cut health funding since 2008, and local health departments have lost 23,000 jobs since then. Among these are the first responders, whom we will rely on during a crisis.

As we’ve been reminded by Hurricane Irene and the earthquake in the Northeast, these are standing resources we always need — however much we hope we never need to call on them. With the growing pressures on state and local budgets we should be worried about a continuing decline.

There’s no mystery about what needs to be done. There are gaps in funding and infrastructure, disease surveillance, workforce, vaccine and drug research and development and manufacturing, surge capacity and community resilience. The only serious question — and one for which there is no algorithm — is whether the public and our leaders are committed to biopreparedness.

Let us hope that another bioterror incident is not required to focus the mind.

Tom Daschle served as Senate majority leader, when his office was targeted by one anthrax letter. He is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and senior policy adviser at DLA Piper. Jonathan Moreno, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and senior fellow at CAP, is the author of, “The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America.”

The creation of human-animal combos has people across the political spectrum worried. Over the summer, a survey by the the U.K. Academy of Medical Sciences found “unease about work that could introduce human traits into animals’ brains, reproduction, or appearance,” according to Nature News.

One conclusion of the U.K. scientists’ report: Strictly verboten is putting human brain cells into higher primates that could make them smarter. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences that I co-chaired in 2005 similarly warned against putting neural stem cells from a human source into a primate without due consideration.

Human-animal chimera are a fundamental part of understanding the biology of cellular development and viral disease.

The point is not that the scientists themselves think there’s something to worry about. The likelihood that anything “human” would survive in the consciousness of primates with human brain cells is remote. Rather, the scientific establishment is worried about what in Washington is called “optics”: How “humanized” creatures might cause a backlash against important biology. Another item in the Daily Telegraph listed cross-breeding a human and a chimpanzee as one of a handful of scientifically valuable but ethically unacceptable experiments.

Still, we obviously find the very idea creepily fascinating. A new Science channel series called “Dark Matter” debuts this fall with the true story of a Soviet scientist’s attempt to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the 1920s. The Planet of the Apes series has included provocative suggestions of inter-species crushes.

The trouble with all this is that important medical research does involve putting some human cells into animals. These lab models, usually rodents, are called “chimera,” after a creature in Greek mythology. Although these chimera are not the results of cross-breeding, some chimera are hybrids, like the geep, which is a cross of sheep and goats.

Happily, the U.K. survey also found that non-scientists’ attitudes shifted when people understood the justification for chimera-based research. Using chimera, geneticists are learning how a single gene operates in a complex system. Chimera are being used to build a foundation in stem cell regenerative science, the study of the ability of stem cells to hone and replace damaged tissue. For instance, in models of neurological disorders, human-primate and human-rat brain chimera have been used to test the feasibility of future neural stem cell treatment of Parkinson’s disease and stroke. In addition to their role as model organisms, human-animal chimera are a fundamental part of understanding the basic biology of cellular development and viral disease. Human-mouse bone marrow transplants have been performed since the 1980s and have been part of studies of AIDS and leukemia.

The British are actually behind the curve when it comes to worrying over mixing species. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush asked congress “to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research,” including “creating human-animal hybrids,” the latter being a special sort of chimera that involves the fusion of genes from two species. Then-Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas had crusaded for years against human-nonhuman organisms. The senator’s latest attempt, the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2009, would prohibit the creation of a whole range of human-nonhuman organisms. The draft bill included findings that human-nonhuman hybrids are “grossly unethical” because they “blur the line between human and animal, male and female, parent and child, and one individual and another individual.” Brownback also emphasizes that human-nonhuman hybrids are a threat to human dignity and to “the integrity of the human species.”

Although the Brownback bill never got out of committee, at the state level there has been some success on this track. In 2009, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law a bill that was similar to Brownback’s, prohibiting human-nonhuman hybrids.

Violation of the law is a felony. A bill passed by the Ohio senate lists eight kinds of “human-animal hybrids” that would be outlawed. A similar bill is up for consideration in the Arizona state legislature. Perhaps Governor Brownback will put forward a similar bill in Kansas.

As I explain in my new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, simmering worries about chimera and hybrids, along with debates about stem cells and cloning, are part of an emerging era of biopolitics. Unlike traditional biology that mainly observed and categorized, the new experimental biology threatens to undermine species boundaries, calling into question what it means to be human, our place in the natural order.

Geneticists at the Max Planck Institute have pretty much proven that our ancestors mated with Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago. Perhaps our collective anxiety about mixing human cells with other creatures is a bit of highly conserved species memory about some really bad dates.

Some might argue about the example and his choice of comparison (as Hippocrates said, “life is short but the art is long”). Still, there is no doubt that biology is a hard slog, and getting some lab science into the world of medical treatment is harder still. SP readers know we’ve been intensely following work on embryonic stem cells, including the period in late 2007 when the opposition declared there was no longer a need for this source of pluripotent cells because adult cells had been reprogrammed to resemble those from an embryo.

But the fact is that the jury is very much still out on whether those reprogrammed cells are similar enough to embryonic cells to be substitutes in the lab. Determining whether they are similar to embryonic stem cells is precisely the reason that embryonic stem cell lines are still needed as points of comparison. Even more uncertain is whether it will ever be safe to put them into patients. In fairness, there are also grave safety issues with the derivatives of embryonic stem cells. In my new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, I review the desultory stem cell debate in the context of our growing tensions about the politics of biology.

The embryonic stem cell research slog hasn’t been made any easier by the legal and political issues that have come up in the last decade, though it appears that the recent U.S. case challenging NIH grants has been resolved in favor of the feds’ continued funding. On the private industry side, a company called Geron received FDA approval to clinical trial now underway for spinal cord injury, the first known attempt to use a product of human embryonic stem cells to address a disease in a human being. That study is now underway.

The second clinical trial involving human embryonic stem cells addresses a disease of the eye, Stargardt’s Macular Dystrophy. Two patient-subjects have received that treatment in the United States, and last week Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. announced it has received permission from British authorities to conduct the study there, as well.

This grinding progress attests to the fact that, unlike politics, there’s no room for triumphalism in biology; it’s a hard slog. Meanwhile, the stem cell controversy has shown beyond dispute that punditry is easy, especially the type that doesn’t require evidence.

So we may welcome the Brits to the slogging plod of human embryonic stem cell research. They should know. It’s their language.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Indeed, “Contagion” is a welcome event even if contagion never is. The movie skillfully depicts the course of a global pandemic, the struggle to survive, and the race for a vaccine. Yet the commentary I’ve seen so far about the film doesn’t give the production sufficient credit for certain elements beyond the sophistication, taut pacing, fine acting, and tense storyline. Consider these science and public policy issues that almost all movie reviewers missed (and beware of some spoilers in what follows):

• Public health workers are the heroes. This is so refreshing. The smart, dedicated people with great intellectual curiosity and a sense of public service are duly honored for their grit and determination in a crisis. And there’s no money in being on the frontline grind of intervening in an emergency or the mundane work of keeping people safe from infectious disease.
• The scientific process is given its due. Time is required to ensure a vaccine doesn’t make matters worse. “Cures” that are too good to be true always are unless they can be validated. As Hippocrates observed, “quacks wickedly hate help,” and they don’t like to have their feet held to the fire of systematic experiments either.
• Bugs don’t care about federalism, they are not constitutional “originalists,” and they haven’t read the literature on posse comitatus, either. A public health crisis severe enough to burden conservative thought would also be a problem for progressives.
• In the acute phase of a crisis as grave as that depicted in “Contagion,” there would be civil disorder, which means having a weapon in the house might make you feel more secure. Yet you’re just as likely to fire at the neighbor kid whose actions you don’t understand.
• If you think vaccination is a government plot or perhaps one ginned up by a conspiracy of politicians, big pharma, and avaricious medical scientists, then you have the right to say no and we have the right to lock you in your house so you can’t endanger anyone else. But if we can’t keep track of your movements and there is a high likelihood of contamination that would result in serious harm, you are not a libertarian, you are a menace.
• Viruses don’t turn people into zombies that want to eat you. This isn’t “Night of the Living Dead,” it’s days and nights of the living suffering.
• When the suffering is widespread and a reasoned, orderly response that calls on vast and diverse social resources is required, there is no substitute for government.  (Here’s the big spoiler.) By the end of the film, in spite of widespread hooliganism and cruelty, tens of millions of people are lining up for orderly vaccination, alphabetically for a year. To paraphrase an old Bill Cosby line, you may not believe in God, but when that ground shakes, you’re gonna look up. And you may not believe in government, but when that virus is on the loose, you’re going to look to city hall.
• The word “terrorism” doesn’t appear in the soundtrack, at least not that I noticed, but the movie nonetheless makes the point that the first response to a pandemic is the same regardless of its source. Our national security can be threatened through lack of preparedness, including poor coordination among 50 jurisdictions, as the Laurence Fishburne character notes.

The 10th anniversary of the anthrax attacks provides a perfect opportunity to ask if we are as bioprepared as we should be. Do first responders have adequate access to the radio spectrum? Are public health departments staffed adequately with people who have advanced degrees and training? Do neighboring states have coordination plans in place and have they done simulations to test them?

As I note in my new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, “governance” was the solution collectively arrived at by people who realized that they couldn’t go it alone in a crisis, however much we like to think we can. Institutions with rules and procedures that can be rationally defended are required. Governance doesn’t necessarily mean “government,” much less the state, but sometimes it does. And when it does we’d better be ready.

“Contagion” isn’t perfect. We’re carrying lots of gross stuff in our guts that nearly always protects us from the gunk we ingest or otherwise absorb. We can thank evolution for that.  But the film does finally remind us of the better angels of our nature. Sometimes they’re the ones in the lab coats.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The most intensely personal and revealing encounter at the Tea Party/CNN debate this week in Tampa was not about the state of the economy or jobs or immigration. It was about vaccinating girls to prevent cervical cancer. Even in an election cycle that is dominated by the economy, feelings about cultural issues continue to be the most raw, especially where the power of modern medical science seems to conflict with tradition values.

Welcome to the era of biopolitics.

Biopolitics refers to the ways that issues raised by biology enter the political process. The most longstanding of these issues in America is of course abortion. Then in the last ten years evolution re-entered the picture with the advent of “creation science,” a dubious tip-of-the-hat to science if ever there was one. That happened around the same time presidential candidates needed to take a position on embryonic stem cell research. A more recent addition to the biopolitical list is climate change, and more recent sill, vaccination of girls to prevent cervical cancer.

In my new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, I discuss the simmering popular anxiety about the power of science, especially the implications of modern biology. Although many on the left share these concerns, cultural conservatives are especially troubled by the way that the ability to understand and manipulate life threatens traditional values and the social order. Like any political trope, the “pro-science/anti-science” theme should be read as a signal about how deeply certain politicians identify with those who worry about the values being transmitted to future generations. Those values have to do with the ways scientists might be able to control the very nature of humanity. The fundamental cultural divide between those who see science as a boon or as a threat has already appeared several times in the political season.

For example, a few weeks ago a fourth grader asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry how old the Earth is. In response, Perry told the student that “in Texas we teach both evolution and creationism in our public schools, because I figured you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.” Less widely noted, his mother reportedly asked the governor “why he doesn’t believe in science.” The media frenzy over the exchange then prompted former Utah Gov. John Huntsman, another Republican presidential hopeful, to say “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party–the anti-science party–we have a huge problem.” Huntsman repeated this line in the debate at the Ronald Reagan Library, though it undoubtedly contributes to the widespread view that he is a relative moderate in this group of candidates.

At the Reagan Library event Gov. Rick Perry was hammered about his executive order that approved a program to vaccinate girls against the virus that can cause cervical cancer, which cultural conservatives fear will entice them to be sexually active. The fact that Perry followed the medical advice of experts on public health provided him no shelter in this debate. Rep. Bachmann followed up by arguing that it’s wrong to impose vaccination on “innocent young girls” and their parents (though like all such regulation Perry’s program had a parental opt-out clause). A few weeks later at the Tea Party/CNN debate Bachmann hammered Perry on the issue, accusing him of “crony capitalism” in order to gain campaign contributions from the drug company, Merck. Underlying the emotions behind the vaccination issue is the fear that a combination of powerful forces — government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the science establishment — are conspiring to undermine traditional values.

At the Tea Party Forum in South Carolina, one of the panelists was Robby George, a popular Princeton University professor who is a leading conservative thinker. George served on President Bush’s bioethics council. George raised the question whether congress can reverse Roe v. Wade based on that part of the 14th amendment of the constitution that is generally known as the “equal protection” clause, which refers to “any person.”

The question whether fetuses or embryos are “persons” reaches into practices well beyond abortion, especially the stem cell controversy. While he was a member of President Bush’s bioethics council George engaged in a debate with another member, Harvard professor Michael Sandel, about embryonic stem cell research. In 2004, while he was a member of President Bush’s bioethics council, Sandel published a widely read piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on “Embryo Ethics.” Does respect for the human embryo rule out using it in research that might provide important medical advances? Sandel argued that it does not, that those who ground respect for the human embryo in the fact that all persons came from embryos commit a logical error. Embryos are not necessarily equivalent to persons any more than acorns are equivalent to oak trees. “Human life develops by degrees,” Sandel argued. In response, George, coauthored a paper in the conservative journal The New Atlantis in which he deprecated Sandel’s analogy. George wrote that Sandel used a false analogy because human beings have an intrinsic value that acorns and oak trees do not have.

Beyond the old and familiar biopolitics of abortion, the new biopolitics results from the potential of experimental biology for remarkable knowledge and control over the nature of human beings. At the same time, Americans face global competition for new products through biotechnology in this “biological century.” As the U.S. economy continues in the doldrums, this potential source of new wealth poses an interesting challenge for politicians who identify themselves as cultural conservatives.

After the economy, biopolitics might just be the item that most challenges the 2012 candidates’ policy prescriptions.

But these criticisms of the threat to global public health, with which I wholly agree, overlook a still larger question about the emerging use of genetic data in criminal investigations, both foreign and domestic.

The CIA story took me back six years to a week I spent in Karachi. I was there to lecture in the inaugural bioethics course at an institute founded by one of my former students. I am proud to say I have several friends and colleagues there who were impeccable hosts.  Among the events held that week was a dinner party where I was treated to a stream of remarkable conspiracy theories, many involving the United States and Israel, of course, but various international powers were represented, real and imagined.

How much of the stories I heard were found credible by the other guests I cannot say, but all were members of the intelligentsia that included physicians, lawyers, and various academics. One conclusion I drew from the experience that is hardly original to me: Pakistan, a wobbly nation with an extraordinary inferiority complex, is the world capital of conspiracy theories.

But in fairness, American society is hardly immune to such notions, including recent claims that autism is caused by preservatives used in the vaccine for whooping cough and other largely vanquished serious threats to children, and theories that the anthrax vaccine delivered to soldiers in the first Gulf War was part of a massive secret experiment. When I was growing up, many in my small upstate New York town were sure that fluoridation was part of a Communist conspiracy.

One of the other conversations I had that week was with several representatives of the World Health Organization. They were there to audit Pakistan’s efforts to stamp out polio. Although on the whole they found the effort successful, the fact is that there are still polio clusters in remote areas that are very worrisome. So WHO still considers Pakistan a place to be monitored for effective polio vaccination. It goes without saying that epidemics don’t respect national boundaries, so these public health campaigns are in everyone’s interest. Unfortunately, there is evidence of declining vaccination rates even in affluent areas. That’s a recipe for trouble, 19th century style, that is no longer in living memory.

Perhaps it can be granted that spiking conspiracy theories with actual operations is not the best long-term policy for cover operations, especially in a field that is already rife with anxiety and so important to protecting public health. Whether covert operations involving the collection of DNA should be part of a security strategy is a distinct issue that deserves to be part of a public debate. Last year Wikileaks cables reviewed by The Washington Post reported that “A senior department official said the requests for DNA, iris scans and other biometric data on foreign government and U.N. diplomats came from American ‘intelligence community managers.’” The report added that virtually all U.S. diplomats ignore the requests. Someday they might not.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress.

But the very fact that American scientists feel the need to aggressively advocate for science conceal a bitter irony that the Times article failed to note: We once had a group of brilliant, influential and politically engaged leaders who were fascinated by science, wanted the country to be the world leader in the pursuit of new knowledge about the natural world, and in some cases even made original contributions.

They were called the founding fathers.

Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin, after whom one political action group, Ben Franklin’s list, is named. One can draw a line of descent from Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his day, to Benjamin Franklin, the greatest scientist of his (and the founder of my university). The list goes on. Thomas Jefferson (founder of my previous employer, the University of Virginia), was famously preoccupied with both astronomy through Newton and political liberalism via John Locke. As a student at King’s College, now Columbia University, Alexander Hamilton was intent on a medical career and attended all the lectures on natural philosophy that he could.

John Adams, John Hancock and James Bowdoin founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. Jefferson and Hamilton, otherwise bitter rivals, made complementary contributions to the innovative foundations of the new country: Jefferson through the patent statute, Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy. By way of the wildly popular pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine was not only the most effective propagandist of the American Revolution, he also closely followed current scientific breakthroughs. In The Age of Reason he declaimed on the size of the earth, the nature of the planetary system, and the scale of the universe. Paine theorized that there must be millions of worlds like ours millions of miles apart.

President Lincoln chartered the National Academy of Sciences just as the modern meanings of the words “science” and “progress” were emerging. Especially in the industrial boom times after the Civil War, moral values were seen as a key consequence of scientific progress. Historian Charles Rosenberg has observed that “[t]he vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans never doubted that human beings had progressed and that this progress — inevitably — subsumed dimensions both moral and material. It was inconceivable to them that the steam engine and morality were not somehow interconnected.” Piety, productivity and, by the end of the nineteenth century, efficiency were all within the same universe of desirable values and consequences of science and progress.

Physics, engineering and chemistry were regnant, and biology was still largely observational rather than experimental, so the great debates about evolution and the origins of life were yet to come. Partly for this reason, conservative religious beliefs were quite compatible with a cohesive moral vision through the late 19th century. Ministers and naturalists could agree on their beliefs about nature. What has changed this American sensibility?

At the turn of the last century the atmosphere shifted due to misconceptions about Darwinism, debates about creationism and, in our time, the advent of experimental biology and modern genetics, which has stimulated political controversies like those over cloning and stem cells. Modern biology has become a cultural wedge. In popular culture, movies like Rise of the Planet the Apes continue a tradition of anxiety about the power of the life sciences that began with “Frankenstein,” with scientists the true villains who, in their fits of hubris, create innocent suffering and creatures who destroy themselves and their creators.

The United States is still by far the biggest producer of new knowledge, but China and other competitors are on the rise. In the 21st century leadership in science is not optional for a nation that proposes to remain a superpower. The new experimental biology will inevitably be part of that new foundation of power and prosperity, but the long-term investments involved require a deep and broad cultural commitment, the kind we’ve had since World War II and that fulfilled the founders’ vision. As I argue in my forthcoming book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, we need to find ways to include the new biology as part of the American narrative of the 21st century.

Ben would have been the first to sign up for his list. Let’s add all our names to his.

Jonathan D. Moreno is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article was also published at the Huffington Post.

Hollywood has done it again. The latest film about creepy scientists setting us on the path to the end of the world as we know and, more or less, love it will soon be in a movie theater near you—“Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Since we’ve been warned for so long by filmmakers and novelists about the dangers of science run amok we really have no good excuse not to believe them. From “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to “Brave New World” to “Blade Runner,” “Gattaca,” “Splice,” and now the inevitable prequel to the iconic “The Planet of the Apes,” we learn anew why we should never tempt biologists with the latest science.

Don’t pass that apple, Eve, just transfect that genome.

Why are we so anxious about biology? Considering how sci-tech crazy the world is, including the convergence of physics, engineering, and genetics, basic biology would seem to be commonplace. That’s the question I pose in my forthcoming book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011).

Through the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers largely set the tone of growing admiration among the educated classes for the importance of science for social improvement. By the early 19th century, the growth of knowledge itself provoked anxiety. Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been a touchstone of popular resentment of overreaching science and scientists. Lately, it has functioned as a standard reference point for the critiques of an arrogant scientific community that messes around with stem cells and cloning.

Although the creature might be the central figure in our nightmares (my mother remembers walking home alone in terror after seeing the just-released 1931 Hollywood version), the center of the story is the scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. The creature is a physical horror but an innocent; the scientist, with his Promethean overreaching, is a moral monster. He and his ilk are the ones we have to fear. Shelley’s tale is nearly always taken out of her context.

Like the later genre called science fiction that she helped inspire, Frankenstein is a commentary more on the present than on the future. Shelley wrote in an atmosphere stirred by the British Romantic science movement of that period, the experimental analogue of the Romantic poets, who were excitedly investigating the properties of air, water, heat, and electricity. They hoped that greater knowledge of the physical world would lead to radical social improvements such as more effective medical treatments.

And they believed that knowledge grounded in demonstrative experiments would liberate the human mind. The idea that electricity could reanimate a dead or assembled body was only one element of Romantic science. It is unfortunate, then, that the most famous reflection on the Romantic scientists is a horror story. Not only did the Romantics anticipate some of the experimentation that flowered a century later with more powerful devices and more nuanced theory, they also stumbled upon at least one discovery that would prove to be enormously beneficial: nitrous oxide, the first truly effective pain reliever.

Thus, already in Frankenstein there is a template: abstract but dramatic anxiety about the direction of science that obscures its concrete achievements for improving human life. Even then scientists needed better public relations. Granted that the bomb made it hard for atomic physicists to improve their poll numbers (especially with all those giant ants roaming around New Mexico in Them!, released in 1954), today’s biologists face an even steeper uphill climb.

In fairness, the director of “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” says that his movie is not an antiscience morality tale but rather “much more about mankind’s hubris.” That, of course, is precisely the point of morality tales. Human overreaching tends to have bad consequences. Just ask Oedipus.

The movie isn’t out until later this week.  But consider our recent experience with another planet dominated by allegedly higher primates. If the smart apes soon to rise in a theater near you can figure out how to straighten out Capitol Hill maybe we ought to give them a chance.

Jonathan D. Moreno teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The plaintiff’s assertions were implausible on substance and process. On substance, there is no “zero sum game” for funding stem cell research. Regardless of the source of the cells, each proposal is reviewed by the National Institutes of Health on its merits. On process, executive branch agencies are normally given the benefit of the doubt by the courts in interpreting congressional intent, and three administrations including that of President George W. Bush had accepted the proposition that funding of research on lines derived from embryonic stem cells did not violate a 1996 rule preventing the NIH from funding embryo destruction.

Stepping back from this legal meandering, the larger importance of this incident lies in the fact that only research on biology has been subject to such a challenge. Even at the fever pitch of our culture wars, no advocates have thought to bring suit against the federal government for funding, say, geological studies that confirmed that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Indeed, from the infamous Scopes “monkey” trial to present-day creationism lawsuits, biology (in particular, the teaching of evolution) has been the wedge into literal readings of the Biblical period of creation. The fact is that modern biology is threatening in ways that the physical sciences are not, a challenge for a country that is both founded on the promise of science and needs science to sustain its leadership role in the 21st century.

This tension between the growing power of biology and the cultural conservative impulse to hang onto what they consider traditional values is one I elaborate in a new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, which will appear this fall. It’s one that has subsided for the moment but which we can be assured will reappear in many forms, in and out of the courtroom.

Since the nation’s founding, progress in the Enlightenment sense has been key to the idea of America. A corollary belief has been an exceptional level of investment in creating a political, legal, and financial environment that encouraged scientific innovation. Jefferson’s patent statute, for example, gives particular latitude to inventors, as the founders (who were themselves remarkably keen on natural philosophy and numbered several world-class thinkers), sought to make the new nation a welcoming home for the brightest and most creative minds. That desideratum stumbled a bit in the first half of the nineteenth century, as southern members of Congress resisted an extensive role for the central government in financing “internal improvements” like canals and bridges; in one telling example, President Lincoln had to wait until secession to create a National Academy of Sciences, itself created partly to advise him on the most promising new armaments.

After the Civil War, public investment in science gradually intensified, as did the promise of scientific knowledge itself. A firm grounding in science, understood mainly in terms of physics, chemistry, and engineering, was thought to be a key feature of the cultivation of civic virtue, including a healthy Christian outlook. Darwinism was mostly influential as a justification for racial improvement (where “race” had a rather different denotation than it came to have in the early twentieth century, as Americanism itself was often thought to be a racial category). Some poorly defined notion of eugenics was famously embraced by just about everyone interested in social improvement, including of course major Progressive Era figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger.

The largely benign view of biology began to change after World War II. Eugenics, in particular, had begun to have a bad odor even before the war, but decisively after the revelations of the Nazi crimes. Then during the Cold War-era the stunning and rapid achievements of laboratory biology produced the bioethics movement, itself a measure of an incipient background concern about the direction of science and the power available to scientists. But this was largely an elite and gentile debate for about 40 years. As ideological lines hardened along the wedge of the 1990s culture wars, so the academic issues of bioethics emerged full-blown into the wider political arena.

The timing of Dolly, the first mammalian clone, in 1996 and the isolation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 could not have been better—or, perhaps, worse—as these esoteric developments coincided with dismay at President Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern. For social conservatives, the scandal crystallized larger concerns about the moral direction of American society. The new “liberal eugenics” of abortion, in vitro fertilization, and the increasing ease with which basic bioparts like bits of DNA could be manipulated meshed, for conservatives, with a narrative of a polity adrift from its moral moorings.

Still more intriguing, these worries cut across standard ideological lines. For reasons that focus more on social justice than human dignity, many progressives share cultural conservatives’ reservations about the implications of the powerful new biology. Yet in a century in which national power and prosperity will be determined partly by leadership in the life sciences, some reconciliation with the scientific prospects ahead will be required. That reconciliation will of necessity be a political process.

That political process can be undergirded by an alliance of bioprogessives on the left and the right. Their platform should be a shared commitment to the continued growth of knowledge as a basic humanistic value, the desire to use knowledge as a force for innovation, and an appreciation of innovation as a source of new wealth. Progressives have a unique opportunity to lead this process, but they need to be guided by a vision that integrates science as a cornerstone of human flourishing along with respect for the power of the science being unleashed.

Jonathan Moreno, Ph.D., is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article was originally published in the Democracy Journal and is republished here at Science Progress.

The first example is the welcome decision by a three-judge panel last Friday concerning federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research. Now that two of the three judges found that the government was not necessarily in violation of congressional intent by supporting this work (an interpretation that was also held by the Bush administration), the question returns to the original judge.

Nonlawyers like me may not be able to sort through the complicated technical legal questions, but we can understand the notion that executive branch agencies may make reasonable interpretations of the law. That, in essence, is what the case is about. After all, Congress’s ban on support for research that destroys embryos was put in place years before embryonic stem cell research and (as the judges just found) seems to have prohibited paying for that process but not research on the cells derived from it. The importance of the case extends well beyond stem cell research and goes to the question of how involved the law should be in determining “acceptable” government-funded scientific research.

Of course, the people, acting through their legislators, have every right to decide what is paid for with their tax dollars and what is not, but at least Congress may be expected to act explicitly on these arcane matters of science funding. And where they don’t do so, agencies must be expected to exercise their best judgment.

As mere mortals, it is often too much to expect more than reasonable interpretations of difficult questions, both in the law and in morality, as the other recent example demonstrates. Recently, The Washington Post reported that the first patient-subject of a human embryonic stem cell trial believes that it was God’s will that he receive a transplant of cells derived from an embryo.

Twenty-one-year-old Timothy J. Atchison of Chatom, AL, is a nursing student whose spinal cord was severed in a car accident. “It wasn’t just luck or chance,” Atchison told the newspaper. “It’s not life. It’s not like they’re coming from an aborted fetus or anything like that. They were going to be thrown away. … once they explained to me where the stem cells were coming from, once I learned that, I was okay with it.” The local Pentecostal pastor in whom Atchison confided, and indeed his whole congregation, also had to confront the issue in a concrete way. They, too, seem to have concluded that Atchison’s participation in the clinical trial was a reasonable interpretation of God’s will.

Are Atchison, his pastor, and the other members of the church right? For about 1,500 years, the dominant philosophy of the West was Platonism. From Plato, both secular and theological systems insisted in perfect insight. In Plato’s philosophy, only a few have knowledge of the true nature of things, knowledge that could only be obtained through divine inspiration. Infallibility finally lost its chokehold on Western thought through the Enlightenment, which emphasized experiment and demonstration rather than allegedly divine insight. A natural aristocracy was replaced by merit and the hard work required to understand the nature of reality. The same applies to morality, as we have learned that there are few easy choices. In so many ways, we are still learning to rely on our own best angels rather than the fantasy of perfect wisdom.

But here’s the problem: Extremely rare events by definition provide precious few data points. There are no “norms” in incidents that take place hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years apart. More problematic still are events that have never taken place but, due to drastically altered conditions, would be largely sui generis—if they ever occur at all. And then there is the fact that individual human lives are brief, and even homo sapiens probably have only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years. Our individual memories are short, and so are our collective memories, and so is the experience that our evolution has not fully factored into our psychology.

Sleep-deprived pundits working overtime on the unfolding crisis in Japan have been circling around but not landing on the underlying philosophical problem: How does one predicate a science or public policy on what statisticians in search of data points would call a very small N?

Now add to this problem the fact that some of these extremely rare events have huge and devastating implications. Over the last few days, we have been told over and over again that the combination of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a set of three nuclear meltdowns or near meltdowns is unprecedented. Tell that to the 1,000 human beings who might have been left on the planet after the Toba volcano 70,000 years ago, or the survivors of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, or the Chernobyl survivors in 1986, or the Bhopal disaster victims, or the residents of New Orleans, or the Haitians, or the Japanese.

To earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, chemical plant disasters, hurricanes, and nuclear meltdowns, some would add to this dispiriting list the risks of asteroid impacts, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and computer takeovers, not to mention the cumulative physical, environmental, political, and sociological effects of climate change. Catastrophic events of low probability and high magnitude can be of natural or human sources or the product of some combination of the two. The physicist Martin Rees and the philosopher Nick Bostrom are among those who have seriously entertained the hypothesis that the parade of perils for which human beings are partly responsible could profoundly disrupt or even virtually eliminate human life over the next century or two.

The main problem here is one of values: How should a society allocate resources to prepare for these low-probability, high-magnitude events? Should we build higher, stronger seawalls or develop rockets with devices that can cause a meteor to swerve a few inches while it is still far enough away from the Earth?

But there is some hopeful news for us empiricists: Disasters are hard to prepare for but not impossible to predict. There are warning signs but we have to look for them. Technology has given us all sorts of canaries that can be strategically placed in coal mines. But even as the Japanese disasters were unfolding, some really dumb legislative proposals were being advanced, laced with transparent politics such as cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami-sensor program.

If human beings really are smart enough to survive, we don’t need extremists, but leaders who can help us prepare for extreme events.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The commission has moved quickly since its inception last July to produce a farsighted report on the opportunities and ethics of synthetic biology and emerging technologies in December. In forming the commission the president asked experts to:

• “Review the developing field of synthetic biology
• “Consider the potential medical, environmental, security, and other benefits as well as potential health, security, or other risks
• “Identify appropriate ethical boundaries to maximize public benefits and minimize risks”

Speakers were Nelson Michael, M.D., Ph.D., a member of the commission and director of the Division of Retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; and Valerie Bonham, J.D., executive director of the commission.

Because of the still emerging nature of this technology, Dr. Michael said, the commission had the “rare and exceptional opportunity to be forward looking instead of reactive,” to “take a deep breath and have a public dialogue.” In other words, it is better to begin to identify where future opportunities and threats may lie as new industries develop rather than to try to address them once entrenched interests have taken root.

Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to organisms and biological systems. The president’s formation of the commission was in response to last year’s announcement that Craig C. Venter had rebooted a single celled organism with an entirely synthetic genome. Dr. Michael pointed out that this process cost roughly $40 million and occupied a whole research team, but the feat caught the world by surprise and triggered a national debate.

There is a debate about whether Venter’s achievement specifically—and synthetic biology more broadly—are revolutionary in science, or merely an evolutionary extension of molecular biology and genetic engineering. According to Dr. Michael, “molecular biology was intended to ask questions and interrogate biological systems, whereas synthetic biology takes a different approach…While [it] sits on the shoulders of those that came before,” what is unique about synthetic biology, he continued, is that “synthetic biology seeks to make useful things.”

What kinds of useful things? Some of most promising near-term applications of the technology include more effective and efficient production of vaccines, environmentally friendly biofuels, and improved pharmaceuticals. For example, the chemical Artemisinin is a powerful antimalarial that currently must be extracted laboriously and expensively from the sweet wormwood plant. The hope is that pharmaceutical companies could use synthetic biology to engineer microbes to produce large amounts of this chemical in a form that is easy to refine, leading to a more affordable production technique for the life-saving drug. Similarly, researchers working in energy are hoping to use synthetic biology to engineer fuels from sunlight at the Department of Energy’s energy innovation hub at Lawrence Livermore. Using synthetic biology, researchers are experimenting with the genomes of algae species to produce high quantities of lipids for easy conversion to fuel.

But these possibilities are just the beginning. As with any emerging field of technology, where it will lead is difficult to predict. In one famous example of innovators failing to see the long-term implications of their technologies, Thomas John Watson Sr., the president of IBM Corporation in the 1950s supposedly said he believed there would be a world market for “maybe five computers.” Today there are about a billion computers worldwide. While it is unclear whether Thomas John Watson Sr. ever actually uttered those words, we do know that IBM Corporation suffered for its myopic focus on hardware and for failing to predict the vast and growing market for software that their innovation would create. If there is anything we know about technological innovation, it is that it is unpredictable.

Nonetheless, there are some common questions that we should ask of any new field, even if we do not know what it will look like in five, 10, or 50 years. The commission members and staff at the event on Thursday also noted that the report has implications for assessment of all emerging technologies. The report advocates that for synthetic biology and any emergent field of technology, policy needs to be guided by the principles of public beneficence, responsible stewardship, intellectual freedom and responsibility, democratic deliberation, and justice and fairness.

In investigating these principles for policy on synthetic biology, the commission engaged with leaders from the science, faith-based, legal, and ethics communities to evaluate potential risks, and created 18 principles for maximizing the public good. They also took a number of public comments, according to the commission’s executive director, Valerie H. Bonham, to ensure that they gathered “opinions from broad swath of society, on both technical and scientific issues and ethical concerns.” The results are a sensible balance between the “let science rip” approach—for example, minimal regulation to allow maximum progress, but also maximum risks—and an extremely measured regulatory approach that minimizes risk but also slows progress.

The president’s commission’s active engagement with stakeholders should serve as a model for the assessment of risks and benefits of new technologies.

You can view the event video and summary here, and you can download the commission’s report here.

Jonathan Moreno, Ph.D., is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor of Science Progress.

The past

The first element of “the new reality” is the post-crisis world. Forum participants were in a much happier frame of mind this year than in the last two when it was not at all clear that the global economy wasn’t going off a cliff (2009), or if there wouldn’t be a double-dip recession (2010). This mood varied from near euphoria to cautious satisfaction. The bankers’ view is clearly that they did what needed to be done. They see a new danger in regulatory overreaction by governments.

A fascinating encounter between Jamie Dimon, chief executive and chairman of JP Morgan Chase & Co., and French President Nicolas Sarkozy embodied this tension, when Sarko roundly and dramatically rejected Dimon’s challenge on that point. In this prominent instance it was evident throughout the meeting that the consensus about the new reality does not necessarily extend to shared norms, at least not so far as the private bankers are concerned. Most of the central bankers and economists, however, seem to agree that the worst has passed but that markets will always produce the odd crisis, so prudence is justified.

The future

The future, of course, is China. This is the second major element of the new reality. The widespread premise at the forum was that mathematically China is on course to surpass U.S. gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in our economy, in 2020. In fact, many at Davos believe they’re deliberately holding down their published growth rate to try to deflect pressure to revalue their currency, the renminbi. There was also a lot of talk about how China is handling its $3 trillion foreign exchange reserve.

Prime ministers from around the European Union urged completion of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round on international trade, a process into which China has attempted to insert itself as a mediator on stalled agreements to lower trade barriers. The inexorable shift from West to East (called by one panelist the “great convergence”), was also tied into inequities and burdens on the health sector. Industrialization brings developed-world diseases and globalization enhances opportunities for epidemic disease—convergence with sweeping economic ramifications for this century.

The present

The third element of the new reality turned out to be the political turmoil in Egypt, an unexpected new reality that began to unfold just as the forum was taking place. A pundits’ panel on the last day was reoriented from a grab-bag discussion to reflection specifically on events in Egypt and the Maghreb. The World Economic Forum, which presupposes the international financial framework and its institutions, isn’t necessarily well equipped to engage in such multifactorial and high-level historical and cultural assessment. The dominant sense of the panel of journalists and senior men of affairs (the panel was all-male and there were no Egyptians), was that caution should be exercised in affecting any predictions, but that a turning point of some sort has been reached for at least some countries in the region.

And in the Science Progress wheelhouse, “innovation” was a word on the lips of virtually every one of the heads of state who marched through the main auditorium, all thinking about the next source of value to further stimulate global recovery. What the “I” word really means undoubtedly varies with the speaker, but several sessions focused on emerging biotechnologies, including synthetic biology and neurotechnology.

Though the national leaders didn’t often refer explicitly to President Obama’s State of the Union address the evening the meetings began, they didn’t’ need to. As much as anyone else, they got the message that the administration is determined to find new ways to push ahead in science and technology. In the words of national leaders from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the meeting’s opening to Prime Minster Naoto Kan of Japan at its end, it was evident that the idea of innovation as the key to economic competitiveness is likely to grow stronger in the coming year.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

In 1970 the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was considering support for a dream of Dr. Andre Hellegers of Georgetown University, to establish an institute for the study of ethical problems that were emerging in the rapidly-changing life sciences.  But what to call the field that the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute would study?  Shriver later recalled a meeting he and his wife Eunice had in their Bethesda, Maryland home with Dr. Hellegers and several others:

“Because of the need to bring biology and ethics together, I thought of ‘bioethics.’  And the people in the room latched onto it as the name of the Institute.  Our idea was that we were starting an ethics institute regarding this new science, with primary emphasis on biology with ethics…. I know full well I proposed the word.  But I don’t think it was a stroke of genius.  It was as easy to come up with the word ‘bioethics’ as falling off a log.”

The retired Georgetown professor Warren Reich reported Shriver’s recollection in a paper he published in 1994.  Although Shriver’s claim is hotly disputed among scholars, the very fact that a progressive, idealistic and engaged person like Shriver was so attached to the idea attests to the importance of these issues in our public life.

–Jonathan Moreno

According to the report, synthetic biology holds great promise to unlock new possibilities in human health and environmental protection. Scientists and entrepreneurs are already working to devise ways to use cells with synthetic genomes to produce renewable fuels, hydrogen, or even generate electricity directly through artificial photosynthesis. In health care it is hoped that synbio may one day lead to improved production of drugs and vaccines, and to novel treatments.

But, as with any valuable new technology, the pursuit of these benefits comes along with certain risks that must be weighed accordingly. Concerns about intentional misuse of synthetic biology aside, there is also the possibility that synthetically developed microbes could escape domestication and cause damage to ecosystems or human health. The report released today recommends a series of regulatory measures to anticipate those risks.

Bioethics Commission Chair Amy Gutmann stated in connection with the release of the study that “We considered an array of approaches to regulation—from allowing unfettered freedom with minimal oversight and another to prohibiting experiments until they can be ruled completely safe beyond a reasonable doubt. We chose a middle course to maximize public benefits while also safeguarding against risks. … prudent vigilance suggests that federal oversight is needed and can be exercised in a way that is consistent with scientific progress,” Gutmann said.

Among the commission’s recommendations:

• The Executive Office of the President, possibly through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, should coordinate federal agencies that oversee areas related to synthetic biology, including oversight, product licensing and funding.
• Risk assessment activities across the government need to be coordinated and field release permitted only after reasonable risk assessment.
• The Executive Office of the President should remain actively engaged with “do it yourself” groups to communicate and discuss applicable safety and security issues.
• Recognizing that international coordination is essential for safety and security, the Department of State, in concert with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, should collaborate with governments around the world, as well as leading international organizations, such as the World Health Organization to promote ongoing dialogue about emerging technologies like synthetic biology.
• The National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and other federal agencies should evaluate research proposals through peer-review in order to make sure that the most promising scientific research is conducted on the public’s behalf.
• Educational classes on the ethical dilemmas raised by synthetic biology should be a mandatory part of training for young researchers, engineers, and others who work in this emerging field.
• Forums should be established to improve the general public’s understanding of this field, including the creation of a biology equivalent to FactCheck.org, in which a private group would track statements about the science and offer an independent view of the truth of such claims.

The complete report is available at bioethics.gov.

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1

Even George W. Bush’s severest critics cannot doubt the seriousness of purpose with which he approached the embryonic stem cell question. A summer of Oval Office meetings with scientists, theologians, and philosophers; sessions with his domestic policy staff; readings on ethics; and a meeting with Pope John Paul II preceded his climactic address in August 2001. That seriousness is further evidenced by the former president’s inclusion of the stem cell debate as one of 14 “decision points” in his new memoir. George W. Bush is a man who has come to admire intellectual curiosity, whether he has it or not.

On the subject of stem cells, and anything that has to do with a certain understanding of human dignity, Bush exhibits the zeal of the convert and the latecomer. The widespread impression that his reflection on problems of human destiny is of recent origin gains unintentional support in the opening paragraphs of chapter four, as he describes a White House lawyer reading to him from British writer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (a cozy scene in jammies comes to mind), which was published in 1932. It depicts a future in which fetuses are bred and brought up in hatcheries, each engineered to one of five castes. The novel is frequently cited as a thought-provoking warning about science gone wrong. The 1997 American film “Gattaca” makes a similar point.

As a teacher, I know that such dystopias are brilliant ways to engage eager young minds, including it seems those of U.S. presidents, but science fiction has certain inherent limitations as a guide to 21st century science policy. Science fiction is necessarily about our hopes and fears for the future. It is not about the future, which is where we actually have to live. These two facts are easily confused. Fans of science fiction (of which I am one of 50 years’ standing) tend to notice the occasions when writers seem to have been prescient far more than when they have been dead wrong.

To his credit Bush juxtaposes Huxley’s dark vision with Nancy Reagan’s personal appeal on behalf of continued research. He credits a conversation with Professor Leon Kass, later to be chair of his bioethics council, as the one that led to his insight: If he funded research on stem cell lines that had already been derived then his administration wouldn’t be complicit in the destruction of future ones. He quotes Kass himself as confirming the logic of this position. By Solomonically splitting the difference, he wouldn’t be tacitly approving the destruction of future embryos.

The tacit approval argument in philosophy implies that any wrongfully obtained information has a fateful moral taint. It is an interesting and perfectly respectable argument, one that has been paradigmatically applied to any useful knowledge that might have been gained from the horrid experiments involving Nazi concentration camp inmates. For anyone who came along after the Holocaust, that association gives moral taint arguments their emotional power. In the case of human embryos, though, the argument begs the crucial question: Is the moral status of human embryos (in this case, those left over in fertility clinics) so great as to counter their value in learning about terrible diseases that affect born humans, such that there is a “taint” on the cells derived from them?

Arguments like this have an uncertain reach. How far do stains spread? In letting himself off the hook the president didn’t absolve the moral stain on “approved” lines; after all, they themselves came from destroyed embryos. Wouldn’t any knowledge that came from them be stained, including that paid for by the NIH? Why wouldn’t the origin of the material that permitted the exploitation of that knowledge stain the venerable NIH itself? Mightn’t any success even with the “approved” lines lead to further embryo destruction for more research, as has in fact happened? At least that should have been obvious within the first few months, when the technical limitations of the approved lines became evident. (In fairness, Bush quotes one distinguished stem cell biologist as saying that 10 to 15 lines would be enough but he doesn’t seem to understand that, unlike in politics, science changes in light of evidence.)

As might be expected in a political memoir, much of the chapter is devoted to score-settling: with scientists for failing to understand how he had helped them; with John Kerry for exploiting the issue during the 2004 campaign; with all those who painted him as “anti-science”; etc.

Bush ends on a triumphant note, taking credit for the development of induced pluripotent stem cells from adult tissues that mimic embryonic stem cells, even though this was first done in Japan. He cites sheep cloner Ian Wilmut’s enthusiasm for the new method but he fails to note that the biologists who actually developed this new technology have insisted that embryonic stem cells are still needed as laboratory comparisons to develop the new technique. Nor does he recall that his White House blocked Wilmut’s call for a ban on reproductive cloning as a crime against humanity because they wanted to stop all research cloning as well. Selective quotation is not the stuff of science.

Bush notes that the 1995 Dickey amendment to the NIH budget prohibits using federal funds for research that destroys human embryos. But in light of the ongoing legal dispute about NIH funding for embryonic stem cell research, perhaps the most striking aspect of the chapter is what the former president does not say: He does not say he had any doubt that under the Dickey amendment NIH could support funding on at least some embryonic stem cell lines. One hopes the D.C. Circuit Court borrows a copy of Decision Points as they deliberate or, better yet, just Xeroxes (read: clones) of that chapter.

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Cody Unser is a normal 23-year old woman. A graduate of the University of Redlands in California, she now pursues her master’s in public health at the George Washington University School of Public Health. In her spare time she loves exploring marine ecosystems as a certified scuba diver. But there is more to Cody than meets the eye: paralyzed from the chest down by a rare auto-immune disorder at the age of 12, she now leads a double life as one of the most effective crusaders for stem cell research funding our nation has seen.

Cody hails from a family with a special status in American life:  Her father is two-time Indianapolis-500 winner Al Unser Jr. and her grandfather, Al Unser Sr., is also a repeat winner of the iconic American race, as is her uncle, Bobby Unser. The Unser’s are a veritable racing dynasty, with a total of 9 Indy-500 titles between them. Coming from a family that is considered American royalty by some has certainly helped Cody to tell convey her message. But Cody knows she cannot rely on her family’s notoriety alone.

“As an advocate, I’m trying to understand more about how to use my personal story and bring it together in a more powerful way,” she says. “I don’t want to just use my story, I want to back it with facts and the truth. And what these [embryonic stem cells] are and what the science is.”

With the help of the First Step Foundation, which she runs with the help of her family, Cody travels the country to raise awareness for spinal injuries, paralysis, and research funding for potentially life-changing therapies such as embryonic stem cells that could one day allow her to regain the use of her legs. She was even asked to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee in September (you can watch the video here). Last Friday, Science Progress’s Jonathan Moreno had a chance to catch up with Cody to talk to her about biopolitics, her future, and educating congress and the public about the importance of science and technology in medicine and society.

“People who walk don’t necessarily think of their shoes as technology as much as I do my wheelchair. There’s a difference there that is interesting,” says Cody. “I rely on [technology] just to get around, from point A to point B. So I’ve learned so much about how technology influences science and health… there are two different avenues it seems… to think of the body not only as biology but also as engineering.”

Cody’s life is intrinsically connected to technology. “I think for a lot of people with paralysis or spinal cord injury, rehab and maintaining their body is a daily struggle—our bodies are deteriorating at a faster rate than most people.” Besides her wheelchair she uses a mechanical standing frame to help keep her bones strong, special scuba gear to allow her pursue her passion of diving, and special electrodes which stimulate her nervous system, allowing her to help maintain leg muscle by peddling on a special bike. From everyday use of technology that young people in her generation have become accustomed to—like Facebook—to the devices that she relies on to live a normal life and maintain her body, to her activism on behalf of millions whose futures literally depend on the rate of advancement of new technologies, Cody knows that she has a special relationship with science and technology.

“I think science gets at the core of our human vulnerability. Both in a negative and a positive [way]. Science has evolved so fast and it freaks people out because we don’t want to lose what makes us human. Science brings about cures in the medical world, stem cell research one day will be able to treat disease and disability. But I don’t think that we will ever lose what makes us human. Science will never be able to push us back that far.”

Science and health policy have a profound impact on Cody’s life, a fact which she thinks has shaped her decision to pursue a career educating Congress and the public about the importance of science and health policy. As an advocate for paralysis victims, Cody represents a population of as many as 6 million Americans living without the use of some part of their body. Of her testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the promise of human embryonic stem cell research, Cody recalls:

“Basically you are the voice of a population whom science can influence and benefit. I was so humbled to be given the opportunity to speak on behalf of a huge community. I represent the spinal chord injury community, but I don’t know what it’s like to have diabetes, Parkinsons… [other diseases that could be cured by stem cell research]. To try to bring everyone together in the same world [to advocate for human embryonic stem cell research] was really cool. To be able to speak on behalf [of that] was something I’ll never forget.”

Ultimately, Cody is humble about the advantages she has had which enable her to pursue her passion for sound science-based healthcare and research policy, and as an advocate for spinal cord injury victims.

“I didn’t have to fight for my right to work or to enjoy my life like anybody else. To be able to now represent that population and not think about those things and move forward…I think the fight is out there. And the fight is different this time.”

Listening to Cody, it’s clear she’s more than up to the fight.

]]> http://scienceprogress.org/2010/11/interview-with-youth-crusader-for-stem-cell-research/feed/ 0 http://scienceprogress.org/2010/10/shape-shifting/ http://scienceprogress.org/2010/10/shape-shifting/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:17:19 +0000 Jonathan D. Moreno http://www.scienceprogress.org/?p=6922 Here at Science Progress we write often about science and technology, invention and innovation. These two valuable traditional distinctions—between science and technology and invention and innovation—are rapidly evolving. Some of the same forces are at work in both cases. As we consider the public policy choices ahead in rebuilding our nation’s industrial economy, it’s important to appreciate how the foundations of technological innovation are changing.

First of all, science and technology are in the process of converging. Technology has been around since at least the beginning of agriculture, arguably in tools and weapons used by hunter-gatherers, but science in its modern form is a latecomer. One difference between science-based and non-science-based technology is that scientific theories often have surprising implications that even their pioneers don’t anticipate.

A classic example: Albert Einstein had to be persuaded by fellow physicist Leo Szilard that the atomic bomb was a practical possibility, partly in light of the Einstein’s own special theory of relativity, so that Einstein would lend his prestige to a letter alerting President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this potential.

Secondly, science-based technology development is remarkably recent, accelerating only toward the end of the 19^th century, with specific, crafted applications of ideas drawn from the emerging explanatory and demonstrable theories, especially in biology. Of course, it is still possible to engage in technical manipulations of the world without paying attention to any underlying theory, so science and technology will never be identical. But there is every reason to believe that the convergence will go on indefinitely, as science becomes an increasingly critical input to the process of technology innovation.

For a time the idea of starting with a scientific theory as a way to solve a practical problem was so novel that the term “applied science” was coined. But so much technology is now science-based, as in the development of new microprocessors, that applied science—particularly in the public policy arena where policymakers want to speed up commercialization of new technologies—is becoming virtually synonymous with technology.

To appreciate the traditional relationship between technology and invention, take the example of Thomas Edison. He was both a nonscience based technologist and an inventor. The incandescent light bulb was built on a diverse array of gradually improved materials and owed its origins only very indirectly to electrical theory (an early theorist of which was another great American inventor, Benjamin Franklin). Alexander Graham Bell was another to whom the term technologist/inventor applies. Both Edison and Bell were brilliant craftsmen who addressed a problem, but neither was an innovator.

Like science and technology, the relationship between invention and innovation is also evolving, but differently. While science becomes an increasingly critical component of innovation, the process of innovation in turn is becoming increasingly dependent on a wider array of activities than just invention.

Innovation, in the words of the historian Harold Evans, involves more than inventing a new technology, it involves “a universal application of the solution by whatever means…. Invention without innovation is a pastime.” Universal application is a matter of dissemination, sometimes called “diffusion,” or moving an ingenious solution out into the world. In that sense, the telephone as an innovation is owed to someone who is far less than a household name: Theodore Vail, the founder of AT&T. His vision and organizational genius turned Alexander Graham Bell’s technology into national telephone service through the merger of Western Union and the Bell Company.

As the technologies that power our lives become increasingly complex, each new useful innovation stands on the shoulders of an ever growing pyramid of previous inventions. The Pentagon’s invention of the Internet in the 1960s created the opportunities for innovators such as Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web. Reminiscent of AT&T’s Theodore Vail, who married two entities to produce his communications system, Berners-Lee joined hypertext to the Internet to produce the Web.

What’s more, the diffusion of inexpensive Internet access into the majority of American homes and businesses, coupled with advanced telecommunications and satellite infrastructure, has made possible yet another innovation, the iPhone application, which can now be instantly disseminated through AT&T’s 3G network to handheld users across the globe.

None of these society-changing technological innovations could have come into being without the work of a diverse array of entrepreneurs and engineers in sectors from computing to telecommunications to infrastructure to marketing—all of whom figured out how to commercialize these inventions by making them useful, profitable, and affordable.

With little notice, these innovations in computing and information technology now shape the science of laboratory biology, as genetic sequences can now be emailed to labs around the world and chromosomes reconstructed from the biochemical data. In this sense, as well, ease and immediacy of scientific communication are giving the scientific community leverage as a new invisible college and also constituting it as a global force, a world polity of instantly shareable knowledge and innovation. The fact that innovations are shaping the way our society and economy function, and even shifting into the development of previously unrelated areas of science and technology are evidence that we have surpassed a factor-driven economy, and exist now in a truly innovation-driven one.

The important public policy lesson is that in the 21^st century technological innovation is not a zero-sum game. Progress in one field of technology or science often yields unpredictable benefits for others. While once an inventor might have relied on her own ingenuity and locked herself in her garage to keep her intellectual property, now the prize will go to those able to collaborate in local, regional, or even global alliances of researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs. Innovation begins with invention, but success or failure of new technologies in shaping society and improving human lives ultimately hinges on whether there is a profitable business plan to be built around the production, sale, and use of that technology.

As the inherently cooperative and interconnected nature of science, technology, invention, and innovation becomes evermore manifest, public policy needs to reflect the emerging reality that these forces will continue to shape our economy and our society in profound ways we simply cannot predict. We need to ensure that our economy is supportive of the full spectrum of innovation activities beyond invention—from research and development, to demonstration, and on to commercialization. We also need a STEM education system that ensures our students are prepared to participate in these activities, and better work force training and higher educational opportunities to enable our students and workers to quickly shift into the manufacturing and services jobs that comprise the 21^st century innovation economy.

These are difficult policies to create and institute. But if public policy recognizes the inherent value of science as not just the pursuit of obscure truths, but as an irreplaceable input to the technology innovation process that sustains our modern economy then policymakers can begin the effort better positioned and better informed about the possible outcomes.

Jonathan D. Moreno is Editor-In-Chief, and Sean Pool is Managing Editor of Science Progress.

Dear Jonathan Moreno,

‘Halt to U.S. Stem Cell Funding May Thwart Search for New Cures’ — Bloomberg News

This is one of the most pertinent reasons why stakeholders of the stem cells arena are now moving to Asia to leverage on Asia’s laissez-faire regulations and capitalize on Asia’s growth potential in stem cell research and application.

And I was in fact quoted in that Bloomberg News story as follows:

“This is a catastrophe. “…It’s now possible that the United States is now taken out of embryonic stem cell research.”

To read the rest of this article, please visit the San Jose Mercury. To read more about how Asia will benefit from the recent injunction on U.S. stem cell research, go here. To read about how the US will fall behind, go here.

If your credulity hasn’t already been strained to the breaking point, now imagine that you’re a scientist who went to his or her lab this morning not knowing if you could continue your work on, say, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s or diabetes, work that was funded by the National Institutes of Health months ago that you were doing just yesterday. These are all plausible inferences that could be drawn from a United States District Court judge’s August 23 decision.

Welcome to the real world.

Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction that stops funding for human embryonic stem cell research because, he said, the plaintiffs are likely to succeed when their complaint has a full hearing and they would be irreparably harmed if the funding were to continue in the meantime. Why did the judge reason that this attempt to stop the research would likely succeed?  Mainly because he agrees that the federal funding violates the 1995 Dickey-Wicker amendment to the National Institutes of Health budget, which prohibits the federal government from paying for research that destroys human embryos.

Yet the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all agreed that federal funds can be used to support research on cells that are laboratory-grown descendents of human embryo cells since that research is on cultured cells, not on embryos, and because the federal funds were not used to conduct research on, much less harm, any embryos themselves. No one during the Bush administration, which was not terribly friendly to embryonic stem cell research, objected to this interpretation of the law.

The Department of Justice has yet to interpret fully the judge’s decision, but one reading of the injunction is that the clock on federal stem cell policy is turned back to 2000. Even research on stem cell lines still in use that were approved for research by the Bush administration would have to stop.

Moreover, Judge Lamberth’s decision reveals a stunning disregard for the precedents he is compelled to follow. Under the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Chevron v. NRDC, a judge must apply a high degree of deference to an agency’s reading of a statute unless the statute’s words are completely unambiguous. So, in refusing to defer to three administrations’ interpretation of the law, Judge Lamberth effectively concluded that all three of them don’t know how to read.

Simply put, it’s far more likely that a single trial judge misread the law than it is that three ideologically diverse administrations all made the same blatant mistake.

Even the application of the Dickey-Wicker amendment to embryonic stem cell research that the court relies on is forced. When Congress passed Dickey-Wicker in 1995 it could not have been thinking about human embryonic stem cell research, which didn’t start until a breakthrough at the University of Wisconsin in 1998. Rather, the amendment was created out of concern for using whole embryos in research, perhaps even creating them for that purpose. Congress wasn’t thinking one way or another about work on cell lines descended from embryos long ago. But now the judge is telling us that the law applies to a condition that could not have been part of congressional intent and is logically distinct from its object.

And the very legal standing that allowed the complainants to get into the court in the first place makes little sense. The plaintiffs include scientists who do research on adult stem cells. They claim they are harmed by the current funding policy because of unfair competition with embryonic stem cell research. But there is no cap on stem cell funding. The NIH will give grants based on the quality of the proposed work, not on the materials to be used.

In fact, adult stem cell research has received three times as much funding as embryonic. Over the past decade funding for adult stem cells has increased, not declined, and it has done so partly because of the greater understanding of stem cell biology gained from work with embryonic stem cells. Where’s the harm to the scientists who work on the adult cells? If their argument prevails they will have used to the courts to elbow out their scientific competition!

The scientists who in good faith have been working on NIH funding for the embryonic stem cell work are the ones who could suffer irreparable harm. More important, so could the rest of us. What the opposition to this legitimate and globalized field has been unable to do through science and the ballot box they are trying to do through the courts.  Let us hope they have only been able to delude a single poorly informed judge.

Update 8-25-10: NIH director Francis Collins has announced that, in light of the court’s preliminary injunction, 50 new grant applications will be withdrawn from scheduled peer review and 12 grants worth an estimated $15 million to $20 million that have already gone through initial review will be stopped.  Another 22 grants totaling $54 million that already are under way and scheduled for annual review in September will be stopped.

As Dr. Collins told reporters: “This will mean very promising research will not get done, screening for new drugs will stop, and researchers who have been energized will likely grow discouraged and move to other countries or on to other research.”

So much for the plaintiffs’ contribution to American science.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

This development is a sign of how elegant the power of detection in modern medicine has become. But it’s also a reminder of how clumsy the power of treatment remains. We’ve seen that with genetics: For all of the talk about genetically engineering super-babies, by splicing and dicing chromosomes, it looks like information from embryonic DNA will mostly be used (for better or worse, depending on your perspective) when couples fearing genetic disease want to select healthier embryos to implant.

With Alzheimer’s, right now, the power to detect has fewer consequences for medical intervention, since the disease remains such a grim diagnosis. Some will question when to offer the test–or even whether to offer it at all. But, sometimes, knowledge really is power. And while some people might use the knowledge to contemplate assisted suicide, years in the future, most would probably use the test simply because they feel the need to have some control–the chance to plan sensibly for the time they have, the opportunity to put their affairs in order, to re-focus their lives on what is really important to them.

There are, and will be, clinical trials for new treatments: People might take the test so that, if they test positive for Alzheimer’s, they can sign up for them–both to contribute to medical science and to preserve a sense of hope. Some might undertake dietary and other lifestyle changes that seem to delay or lessen the symptoms. The evidence that these kinds of adjustments can make a difference is not definitive but it is growing. One benefit of the tests: Enabling more long-term studies of the benefits of lifestyle modifications.

Read the rest of the article at The New Republic.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Last week the Food and Drug Administration gave its first approval for a clinical trial of an embryonic stem cell treatment. Embryonic stem cells are special because they can grow, or differentiate, into any kind of human tissue. Many believe they hold great promise for treating a wide range of diseases and disorders, from Alzheimer’s to cancer to spinal cord injuries to blindness.

The FDA had put the application from biopharmaceuticals company Geron Corp, which produced the cells, on clinical hold after some mice given the treatment developed tiny spinal cysts. But another animal study found no cysts. The testing will involve patients with recent spinal cord injuries, who will receive infusions of embryonic stem cells that have been differentiated into cells that can produce myelin, the coating that conducts electrical impulses in the spine.

There is no expectation that this cell treatment would magically regenerate spinal cords, though much could be learned from a greater understanding of how new cells integrate into damaged tissue. Rather, the goal is to facilitate some improved potential for movement along with strenuous physical rehabilitation. It is thought that recently injured patients might be more susceptible to improvement.

The company is reported to have spent $150 million to get the trial approved.

The stem cells developed by the company are derived from an embryo that was left over following fertility treatment. It had to be donated with full informed consent by the couple. Geron was able to proceed with the lab work to develop the treatment in spite of the Bush administration policy that severely limited federally funded embryonic stem cell research.  Several years ago the company produced dramatic footage of injured rats that had been treated with the cells and were able to regain movement.

The greatest concern that experts have about the trial is that potent cells injected into the spine might develop into tumors called teratomas. This worry explains the FDA’s cautious approach.  Although there are nonembryonic stem cell treatments for spinal cord injury that have been tried, they have been criticized for inadequate safety data from animals and unclear explanations of surgical procedures. By contrast, owing to the potential harm, novelty, and public controversy, the Geron trial is surely among the most intensively reviewed proposed clinical trials in history.

All this does not guarantee success, of course, nor does it guarantee that no harms will result.  This is biology in the real world, not a computer simulation. But it does establish a reasonable regulatory pathway for human embryonic stem cell treatments for serious diseases that currently have only very inadequate therapies, a milestone that would have been all but political science fiction just a few years ago.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Obama administration’s responsible stem cell policies, dozens of new embryonic stem cell lines are being approved for federally funded research under grants from the National Institutes of Health. This should lead to more academic centers engaging in targeted research with these and other stem cells sources.

While the FDA’s approval of the Geron trial is just a small incremental step forward for potentially lifesaving research, it represents a significant break from past bickering, and raises the inkling of hope that someday we may wonder what all the shouting was about.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Informed consent protects the rights of people who participate in research studies. Research subjects may be medically, psychologically, and socially vulnerable, and they are therefore entitled to have their personal autonomy respected by providing them with the information they need to decide whether or not to participate in the research.

Informed consent historically grew out of scandals and tragedies during human experiments from the 1960s and 1970s. But it’s now being applied to the collection of human tissues for laboratory research in a way that may not make sense and interferes with promising medical science.

Two recent cases illustrate the problem: an Arizona Native American group that objected to the medical use of anonymous blood samples for research purposes other than that specified in the original consent form; and embryonic stem cell consent forms that, again, specified only research on a certain disease. The materials in the first case were returned to the tribe, and in the second the National Institutes of Health is not permitting research funding on the cell lines affected by the consent restrictions.

We don’t advocate violating the consent forms once they are in place, but it is more appropriate going forward to treat these materials as gifts. The donors would have no ongoing rights and the materials would not be restricted in their research uses. Donors would still have the possible lab uses of their tissues explained to them, but with the provision that they understand they are giving them to science rather than “consenting” under the conditions of a form.

A gift model has another important advantage over a consent model: It would be clearer to donors that they would not stand to gain in any commercial value that might come from products of work with their tissues.

Of course, all the needed privacy conditions would also apply so that the researchers would not be able to trace the materials back to the donors. There is no reason that a gift approach can’t be just as ethical as an informed consent model of tissue donation.

The idea of informed consent for these kinds of donations seems to have grown up accidentally as part of the medical research system in a similar way to clinical trials. But it seems to us that it’s time to revisit the reasoning behind this system since a tissue donor is not directly involved in the research and the system is often impeding important medical studies.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

The announcement by Craig Venter last week that his eponymous institute has “rebooted” a cell using a made-from-scratch length of DNA has excited the usual round of pronouncements that a milestone has been reached, that Venter is the first scientist to truly “play God.” This ambiguous assertion is in some cases accompanied by demands that synthetic genomics cease and desist, and that if necessary there should be a government ban. The world of science got a remarkably similar shock in 1828 when Friedrich Wohler first synthesized an organic compound from non-organic chemicals. But more on that in a moment.

The objections are of two kinds. The first is that this technique significantly aggravates threats of bioerror, enabling some unintended environmental threat, or bioterror, the hostile use of synthetic biology. The second objection is that, in creating from non-life (in this case, a string of chemicals arranged as base pairs), a fundamental line has been breached, that God-playing in the laboratory has finally and truly arrived.

The first objection has some merit, though not as much as is often claimed—at least not in the short or mid-term—and is not unique to synthetic biology. New forms of governance will be needed, as is the case for all innovation and in particular for modern biology. The possibility of human error will need to be addressed as it always is, through education, cultural change among scientists, systems of accountability and record keeping, and perhaps licensure and accreditation. While we may not agree that Venter’s experiment is “the quintessential Pandora’s box moment,” improved governance of biotechnology at both the domestic and international levels for biotechnology should be on the agenda.

Biological weapons for tactical purposes have never much panned out. Anyone who’s interested still has quite a selection provided by Mother Nature; it’s hardly necessary to order DNA synthesizers. Building a stronger and more uniform public health system is still our best defense, along with a good dose of public trust in the event it becomes necessary for authorities to request citizen cooperation in curtailing travel. In the long run, while some will be tempted to try to impose phony “secrecy” systems, the experience with the atomic bomb should have taught us the limitation of that approach. And unlike atomic physics, it is increasingly easy to do biotechnology in modest settings. Openness is the best response to dual use, the fact this new technology could be used for ill and for good.

(And speaking of the Bomb, it’s worth pondering why people get so much more nervous about a new biology paper than they do all those thousands of nuclear warheads around the world.)

The second objection, that Craig Venter and his colleagues have played God by creating synthetic life, thereby crossing a line, has of course been heard many times before. In the case of Venter et al.’s work however, no less a theological authority than the Vatican pronounced it acceptable if used to treat disease and clean up the environment. Yet at least one official of the Italian bishops’ conference said that scientists “should never forget there is only one creator: God.”

Whether synthetic biology brushes up too closely to this theological boundary or not, scientists long ago ventured well into that frontier. At least if one takes the formulation of Genesis 2:7 as the definition of God-playing, that distinction appears to have first been achieved in 1828, just ten years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein established the paradigm for worries about hubristic science. Friedrich Wohler, while teaching chemistry in Berlin, applied ammonium chloride to silver isocyanate to produce urea, the main nitrogen-carrying compound found in the urine of mammals. In so doing he synthesized an organic substance from non-organic matter. Life from dust. It was something the chemistry of the day took to be impossible, assuming that life could only come from life. Wohler’s modest experiment proved them wrong, utterly changed organic chemistry, and laid down a philosophical marker—or perhaps kicked one over.

What is clear is that the latest event in synthetic biology is one step in a long path. Whatever challenge it may pose to our contemporary assumptions, it would be foolish to reject wisdom from any source in helping us decide where the path should lead, divine ones included.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

• advance our understanding of basic biology
• create new vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tools
• repair diseased tissues
• engineer new carbon-neutral energy sources
• provide countermeasures for polluting environmental toxins

Synthetic biology, or “synbio,” is a relatively new laboratory discipline that involves creating or altering new life forms. The basic tools of synbio are standard biological parts—sets of genes and chromosomes with known and specific functions created in modern biology labs—that can be assembled to program cells and control an organism’s functions. The process resembles computer programming in that scientists assemble blocks of genetic “code” into instructions for tiny cellular machines.

“Biobricks” are standard, interoperable pieces of DNA for genetic engineering. They are already widely available from commercial websites and the relevant skills for creating them are known to any reasonably competent biology graduate student. Taking advantage of rapid advances in gene sequencing, even college students are learning the techniques. Engineers use biological parts like genes, proteins, and portions of chromosomes to build new microscopic organisms that behave in certain ways. Synthetic biology is only in its infancy, and it will likely be combined with such other emerging fields as nanotechnology to create entities that blend the mechanical and biological.

Synbio nonetheless raises a wide variety of issues that will need to be addressed through a combination of monitoring and regulatory measures, without inappropriate restrictions that block innovation. These issues include:

• Potential environmental hazards due to the accidental release of man-made organisms that may turn out to be harmful and difficult to eradicate
• The possibility that treatment-resistant bacteria or viruses could be synthesized for use in biological warfare
• The risky combination of portions of genes from a human source with those from a non-human source, whether biological or non-biological

For other reasons individuals across the social and political spectrum may also find synbio intrinsically objectionable. The matters of potential cultural concern are far more complex than those faced in the stem cell debate. Many will not view the creation of new life forms capable of performing specific tasks as morally neutral. Political realignment around “naturalness” is a phenomenon that has become familiar in other areas, such as human cloning and genetically modified organisms. A similar reaction could apply to synthetic biology as its implications enter popular awareness.

These worries need to be addressed with seriousness and candor. Scientists and investors rightly complain that inappropriate regulation can impair the development of a new field, yet the rise and fall of public interest in and support of gene therapy should serve as a cautionary tale. Experience has shown that a single adverse event can have an enormous impact on public perception. Ever since the French Enlightenment, trust in scientists has been a crucial component of public support of scientific and technological innovation.

Governance of biotechnology has several elements. Self-policing by the scientific community is necessary but not sufficient. In this field there is an irreplaceable role for smart government, but authority for oversight and regulation of synbio in the United States is currently at best a partial patchwork. The National Institutes of Health require labs receiving its funds to comply with Recombinant DNA guidelines; the Food and Drug Administration would have to approve a drug created by synbio; and the Department of Agriculture might be responsible for avoiding the environmental release of synthetic organisms. But current regulations may not address unique risks posed by the technology.

Nor will merely domestic arrangements be enough. The context for the scientific and commercial interest in the field is a research and development system that has in the past decade or so become globalized to an unprecedented degree. International cooperation and continued scrutiny at many levels of government will be required, as technology will almost certainly rush ahead of current conventions. Researchers and their supporters should also seek innovative approaches for verifying the character and safety of new life forms created through synbio.

Over the long term, the social and scientific impetus behind synthetic biology will overcome political posturing. The greater danger is that through overreaction and misunderstanding we could miss an early opportunity to engage in careful assessment of the research and the development of improved or new regulatory models to avoid harms and maximize the potential benefits of synbio for the common good.  The industrial platforms that this technology is helping to develop will be key components of prospering national economies and national security systems over the next fifty years. America can and must be among the leading innovators.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

More on synthetic biology from Science Progress:

Ribosomes Rising: Synthetic Biology Accelerates
By Jonathan D. Moreno

Synthetic Biology: An Overview and Recommendations for Anticipating and Addressing Emerging Risks
By Denise Caruso

All Together Now: As Emerging Technologies Converge, So Should Ethical Discussions

Interview: David Deamer Explains Synthetic Life: Unpacking the Latest Advance in Biology
Interview by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

Since the 1990s, bioethics commissions have looked closely at scientific advances of breathtaking power, including technologies that have cloned sheep, isolated human embryonic stem cells, and mapped the entire human genome. But commissions working for liberal and conservative administrations have reached different conclusions about the intersection of science and ethics. In this excerpt from the recent book, Progress in Bioethics, editors Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger explain why the progressive approach to bioethics is particularly appropriate, because the core idea of progress is closely associated with the modern idea of science, and bioethics itself embodies a progressive spirit.

The last few years have seen increases in the numbers of self-described progressives and progressive organizations. The new progressive movement is not simply an attempt to abandon the politically compromised label ‘liberal’, but is rooted in certain commonalities between the turn of this century and that of a hundred years ago. Progressives in the early twentieth century faced economic and political changes that seemed to threaten their values and even their very way of life. Similarly today, globalization weakens the ability of the nation-state to regulate its economy, and the global security landscape is dotted with more and more powerful and unpredictable actors, even as we become increasingly aware of growing wealth disparities and of our interconnectedness to people on the other side of the world. The effects of these changes have been felt acutely in the United States; people are concerned about losing jobs in an international marketplace, about the failing social safety net, and about security threats from abroad. The realization that new solutions are needed to confront these issues and many others underlies the modern progressive movement.

In this chapter we will place contemporary American progressivism in historical context and identify some central themes of progressivism in bioethics. As a political philosophy, progressivism complements and builds upon the values of liberalism by emphasizing transparency as an important element of democratic processes, the importance of expertise rather than ideology in public policy, public regulation of concentrations of wealth and power, and activism in the pursuit of social justice. American progressivism is also deeply influenced by pragmatism, which encourages a focus on achieving the goals of social policy by means that work rather than on ideologically based a priori judgments about the efficacy of governmental or private sector solutions to public problems. A progressive approach to bioethics is particularly appropriate because, as we shall explain, the core idea of progress is closely associated with the modern idea of science, and bioethics itself embodies a progressive spirit.

As progressives who work in the field of bioethics, we are interested in the ways these values may guide policies and practices in the life sciences, as well as in pitfalls progressive bioethicists must be careful to avoid. Just as America faces major economic and political changes, the concerns stimulated by modern biology are in important respects unprecedented, and are having a significant effect on Western society as a whole. The cloning of Dolly the sheep, the isolation of human embryonic stem cells, and the mapping of the human genome have catapulted biology, and thus bioethics, onto the national stage. One of President George W. Bush’s first major policy initiatives concerned federal funding for stem cell research, and that issue has been prominent in a number of recent elections. Bioethics has also become a major concern of the conservative movement, particularly among neoconservatives and the religious right (Hinsch 2005). But the need for a progressive bioethics extends beyond simply a political response to the burgeoning public interest in the field. The progressive focus on bioethics represents some- thing greater: a realization that these are significant changes in the life sciences, changes that progressives would do well to pay attention to and address.

While conservatives have devoted significant attention to biotechnology issues, their approach has not been successful. Although admirable in urging a focus on broad philosophical questions, in practice the conservative response to legitimate issues raised by biotechnology has often been ineffectual and shortsighted. Conservatives frequently default to reflexive opposition to new technologies, an opposition that is almost always overtaken by practical events. Worse yet, this all-or-nothing approach leaves them, and the rest of society, unprepared to address the challenges that are raised by the gradual adoption of new technologies. Consider conservative opposition to in vitro fertilization, which culminated in President Ronald Reagan’s decision not to fund IVF research. Rather than smothering the nascent technology, his actions simply allowed it to develop in the private sector, unregulated and self- regulated, which has caused a number of troubling developments we are now beginning to face (Mundy 2007). By preventing the government from regulating cloning and stem cell research through federal funding and other vehicles of public control, research opponents actually help foster similar problems.

Rather than seek to stop change in its tracks, progressives have historically understood that one can view aspects of it as problematic without rejecting it wholesale. Seeing rapid industrialization in the beginnings of the twentieth century, progressives recognized that it was leading to a dangerous accumulation of political and economic power in the hands of a few. But they also saw that it was strengthening the American economy, and that it could not be stopped or reversed. Rather than fight economic and political change in principle or accept it as inevitable, progressives sought to ensure that this change would be influenced and constrained by widely shared values of rewarding hard work, providing economic opportunity, and strengthening democracy.

The changes wrought by biotechnology are in a similar vein—challenging, but potentially very beneficial—and thus require a similar approach. Progressives should not unduly oppose the use of new technologies, but they also should not forget that these technologies must be controlled and regulated so as to comport with our shared values. There is no denying that many find the implications of new biotechnologies disconcerting, and for good reason. Despite their tremendous promise to improve our lives, they also present novel and sometimes unsettling prospects. The synthetic manufacture of deadly pathogens, growing disparities in access to both conventional and newly developed medical care, and the continued commodification of the body are all issues posed by recent medical discoveries. Progressives must be careful to balance enthusiasm for the positive possibilities of new biotechnologies with a healthy respect for their potentially negative effects.

Further, many of these issues cannot be easily addressed with old methodologies. Consider, for example, the tensions facing the reproductive rights movement’s support of reproductive choice when new bio- technologies offer (or will offer) the potential not only to choose when to have a child, but also choose what characteristics it will have (Berger 2007). The issue of reproductive choice takes on new meaning when people can use it in a discriminatory manner, choosing not to bear a child who is a girl or who has a disability. What was once a rallying cry for reproductive rights now seems problematic in certain contexts. These types of novel problems will require equally novel and adaptive solutions. As progressives, we must understand that change will come; the question is what we will do to shape that change.

Progressivism: Past and Future

We can learn much from the original progressives of more than 100 years ago. The Progressive Era was a time of optimism as well as rapid change. Many took seriously the proposition that government could be an institution of reform. At the dawn of the twentieth century, America was feeling the effects of the Gilded Age, a second industrial revolution that made local businesses give way to factories and moved political power from the small towns to the big cities. A small group of businessmen capitalized on these changes, amassing vast wealth and power. With these changes came new problems as ordinary people struggled to adjust to the changing economic realities and government was corrupted by the powerful.

Seeing these problems, and believing in their own ability to fix them, Progressives embarked on one of the most ambitious plans for reform since the Founding. They sought to embrace the potential of these new developments, but also to ensure that this potential was shaped by their shared values. “Progressives arose to bring order to both politics and the economy, but their quest was at least as much about morality as about political economy. The values of the Progressives were rooted in the old virtues, even as they accepted that the tides of industrialism could not be turned back.” (Dionne 1996b, 35) Muckrakers like Upton Sinclair exposed the deplorable working conditions in factories, activists like Jane Addams provided help to the poor immigrants who flocked to urban areas looking for work, and trustbusters like Theodore Roosevelt broke up illegal business monopolies and heightened industry regulation. Academics also joined the fray, realizing that “the function of ‘social science’ wasn’t simply to dissect society for non-judgmental analysis and academic promotion, but to help in finding solutions to social problems” (Moyers 2003). Progressives determined that to limit the deleterious effects of national corporations they would have to give increased power to the national government to protect the interests of ordinary people.

In order to effectively use government as an instrument of the popular will and public interest, Progressives first had to clean it up, rooting out corruption and replacing it with competence and a spirit of public service. Newspapermen like Lincoln Steffens exposed government corruption, while Progressive politicians such as Robert LaFollette and George Norris ran for public office and won. They created fairer labor standards, publicly owned or regulated sanitation, transportation, and utility systems, and better consumer protection. They passed laws barring corporate campaign contributions, and a constitutional amendment allowing the direct election of senators in an effort to clean up the “Millionaire’s Club” the Senate had become. They worked to make government transparent, accountable, and fact-based.

Yet the Progressive Era was not an unqualified boon, particularly in the realm of bioethics. While everyday workers saw improvements in their lives, there was also a resurgence of racism and segregation, encouraged by a “science [that] increasingly endorsed many Americans’ belief that some races were better than others” (McGerr 2003, 192). And the same impetus that inspired academics to fight for workers’ rights also caused some of them to associate themselves with eugenics and social Darwinism. Tainted as it is with the horrors of Nazi Germany, it is hard to imagine eugenics as a progressive movement. Yet eugenics was widely viewed as the progressive biology of the day, justifying a public policy that included the forced sterilization of “inferior” people such as the mentally retarded, the deaf, and certain ethnic and racial groups. No less a progressive leader than President Theodore Roosevelt said “We have no business perpetuating citizens of the wrong type.” (Moreno 2007) Although progressives were not alone in embracing eugenics, and although some of them were among its toughest critics, progressivism must bear its share of the blame for attempting to elevate a biological theory to pubic policy.

The resurgence of progressivism has focused on emulating the economic and political successes of the era while avoiding the moral failures. Contemporary thinkers liken the economic dislocation caused by the rise of transnational corporations and international competition to the prob- lems caused by national corporations in the 1900s, which resulted in similarly dramatic changes in political systems and moral values (Dionne 1996b). These new progressives have taken up the challenge of ensuring that the economy still has a place for the individual, that politics does not become a plaything of the powerful, and that we do not lose our sense of common purpose and values in the face of tumultuous change (Halpin and Teixeira 2006).

But we also face an era of unprecedented biological change. Scientists continue to develop the ability to clone mammals, regenerative medicine seeks to unlock the power to heal ourselves with our cells, synthetic biology may allow us to create new species, and genetic modification offers the potential to radically alter our DNA. As scientific changes challenge and revise our very definition of life (Borenstein 2007), there is a special role for a progressive bioethics. In working to ensure that these changes improve the common good, we must look to hard-won values of respect for persons and protection of human dignity.

Science and Progressivism

A distinctly progressive bioethics is a natural outgrowth of the close connection between progressivism and science. That the words ‘progres- sive’ and ‘science’ gained their modern meanings at the same time was no historical accident, but rather a demonstration of the shared belief inherent in both the scientific method and the notion of progress that the power of knowledge acquired through systematic inquiry can improve the conditions for human flourishing. In many ways, progressivism is simply the application of the method of science to the development of public policy. At its core, “the American Progressive tradition [is] resolutely experimental rather than reflexively ideological, in constant search of new methods, insistent on continuous reform” (Dionne 1996b, 15). Progressivism is predicated on the questioning of assumptions, on openness of inquiry, on reliance on empirical data, and on transparent communal investigation. Policies are to be based on experiment, not belief; Justice Louis Brandeis expressed this attitude when he referred to the states as laboratories of democracy in which new policies could be tested and improved. Just as good science requires a community of informed and empowered researchers reconsidering existing assumptions in light of data, good government requires knowledgeable and capable citizens and legislators doing the same.

The application of scientific principles to governance can be seen not only in the style but also in the substance of progressive policymaking. Progressives brought regulators with greater scientific expertise and adherence to the scientific method into government to ensure food and drugs were safe. They sought to bring empirical analysis to the selection of members of government itself, greatly expanding the number of government jobs given through the merit system. And they sought to replace the old system of nepotism and corruption that had dominated politics with a government that was responsive to hard facts instead of cold cash. Progressives saw the scientific method as a singularly successful mode of objective inquiry, one that would have similar successes when applied to government.

Progressivism’s Promise and Perils

Progressivism is as promising an approach to governing today as it was a hundred years ago. Embracing the spirit of American pragmatism, progressivism focuses on results rather than ideology. Thus, certain problems may require more government intervention, while others may be more amenable to market solutions; only data and experience can deter- mine which is the best means of addressing an issue. Progressives also acknowledge the changing nature of society, understanding that past solutions may not be applicable to current problems. More than that, progressives are hopeful, believing in the capacity of human beings to shape a better world for themselves and their children. They appreciate the possibilities of technology and the use of scientific and technological expertise to achieve our most ambitious goals. Rather than opposing change, progressives embrace the possibility of a new world, seeking to shape it through our shared values into the world we want it to be. And progressivism is mindful of the less powerful, the people in whom political power is and should be vested, ensuring that government works for their interests. This flexible, evolving philosophy is well suited to a quickly changing political landscape in which yesterday’s wisdom is today’s folly.

Like any governing philosophy, however, progressivism has the potential to go awry. Exaggeration of progressives’ support for expertise, belief in our ability to effect positive change, or concern with practical results can lead to impulses that are antithetical to the spirit of progressivism. None of these problems are necessary results of a progressive sensibility, but they do point to potential pitfalls within progressivism that could subvert its effectiveness and its ultimate goals. To avoid these dangers, we must understand the excesses from which they stem.

The belief in the potential of science, evidence, and expertise to solve societal problems can lead to dangerous elitism if not balanced by a keen sense of the limitations of science, as is true for any human endeavor. When relying on expertise and evidence, there may be a tendency to ignore people who are not experts, or to discredit arguments that rely more on moral sentiment than on science. Of course, democracy is based on the notion that individuals can and should make their own political decisions, and creating an environment that allows an engaged citizenry to make these decisions is at the heart of the progressive project. Yet those who strongly support rational, fact-based reasoning may shy away from the messiness of democratic consensus building and gravitate toward the seemingly clearer and cleaner world of elite decision making. This strain of elitism coupled with a belief in the objective truth and power of science was apparent in some progressive reformers in the 1960s, including overzealous social scientists who overestimated their ability to repair social ills. Their perceived failures to fix problems such as de facto school segregation and poverty led to a backlash among intellectuals who “doubted that imperfect and unpredictable human beings could be organized socially on the basis of ‘scientific’ knowledge alone” (Dionne 1991, 60). Many of these critics coalesced around the new journal The Public Interest, which aimed to show that the capacity of social policy to fix intractable problems was limited; eventually, many of those critics would become major figures in the neoconservative movement. Conservatives trace progressive elitism directly back to the optimism of the Progressive Era. The noted conservative intellectual William Schambra erroneously describes Progressives as those who wanted the “transfer of political power away from everyday citizens and their chaotic, parochial, benighted local organizations, often steeped in foolish religious mythology” and who believed that “power should instead be put into the hands of centralized, professionally credentialed experts trained in the new sciences of social control” (2006, 2). While Schambra vastly overstates the undemocratic impulses in progressivism, his critique shows the concern many have for advocating too strongly for expert leadership, particularly in areas where expertise itself is lacking.

Elitism can also lead to a broad utopianism when progressives become too sure of their ability to address any and all of the world’s problems. Not recognizing human limits, they may overreach and fail, thus doing more damage than if they had done nothing. The historian Michael McGerr view today’s impoverished politics as a direct result of the excesses of the Progressive Era, which “offer[ed] the promise of utopianism—and generat[ed] the inevitable letdown of unrealistic expectations” (2003, xiv). Try to do too much and you may convince people they are incapable of doing anything. But the danger lies not only in lowered individual expectations, but also in unexpected negative results from large-scale, poorly understood changes. The neoconservatives termed this the “law of unintended consequences,” arguing that in the 1960s “one well-intended program after another had failed, often by solving one problem only to create another one” (Dionne 1991, 60). In abandoning tradition, conservatives argue, progressives revealed a hubristic belief that they knew better than centuries of painstakingly accumulated human knowledge. Seeing the problems too narrowly, progressives failed to understand the totality of their actions, and at times did more harm than good.

And there is some reason for present-day progressives to be wary of overstepping their bounds. As evidenced by the Progressive Era, the scientific impulse can be abused. Faith in progress inspired protection of workers and accountable, open government, but also was twisted to support eugenic sterilizations stemming from pseudo-science. As long as science carries cultural cachet, people will attempt to justify terrible actions by recourse to it. And there are always limitations to our knowledge and our ability to effect change; the Green Revolution and the war in Iraq are clear testaments to that.

There is also concern that progressives, in their constant efforts to achieve reforms and to solve one problem after another, will lose a sense of the larger picture. Rather than think about the ends, progressives could find themselves too caught up in the means, focusing on the most efficient way to achieve a goal without adequately questioning whether it is desirable. Anticipating the neoconservative critique of mainstream bioethics, this concern was forcefully articulated by Randolph Bourne, a progressive who split with John Dewey over Dewey’s support for American involvement in World War I. Criticizing pragmatists, the philosophical school most closely associated with progressivism, Bourne complained they were elitists who were “hostile to impossibilism, to apathy” and had thus created a generation of young intellectuals “immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing on ends” (1967, 88). The young pragmatists had “absorbed the secret of scientific method as applied to political administration . . . [but] they had never learned not to subordinate idea to technique” (ibid., 88–89). This concern seems surprising in view of other commentators’ suggestions that Progressives were prone to utopian idealism, but it demonstrates that excess has the potential to corrupt underlying goals in many different ways.

There are strong echoes of these worries in the conservative (and especially neoconservative) bioethicists’ project to return to the bioethics of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the conversation focused on the moral ends of the life sciences rather than on the appropriate means of utilizing technologies. They worry that in practice bioethical theory has become “thin” with its emphasis on personal autonomy, rather than “thick” with reflection on the goals of medicine, the nature of humanity, and the preservation of human dignity. In particular, Leon Kass, the former chairman of George W. Bush’s bioethics council, has called for a “richer” bioethics that does not have moral consensus as a goal and seeks more than mere procedural solutions to ethical dilemmas. These conservative bioethicists fear that the lack of concern for ends could leave progressivism lifeless, a mechanical pursuit of one goal followed by the next, with no uplifting moral vision. In a sense, Bourne and others worried that Progressives’ focus on science was causing them to forget the poetry, the humanity of their pursuit. Of course, these concerns are directly connected to worries about elitism and anti-democratic impulses stemming from a distancing of professionalized reformers from the “irrational” masses. Their present-day form can be seen in conservatives’ efforts to paint their opponents as “pointy-headed intellectuals” too caught up in the ivory tower of academia to understand ordinary people, and in the left’s perpetual worry that it is so focused on policy prescriptions that it lacks a narrative or vision with which to connect with the common man.

It is no accident that the themes of elitism, utopianism, and excessive concern with means also appear in conservative critiques of science, particularly in the writings of neoconservative bioethicists. Drawing on the distrust of earlier neoconservatives for social science expertise, this later generation has exaggerated their worries to encompass the hard sciences as well. The theme of arrogant scientists, dismissive of the common people and unwilling to accept any of their restraints, is a common one. It stretches at least as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The neoconservative bioethicist Eric Cohen captures the critique in its latter-day form:

From the beginning, science was driven by both democratic pity and aristocratic guile, by the promise to help humanity and the desire to be free from the constraints of the common man, with his many myths and superstitions and taboos. The modern scientist comes to heal the wretched bodies of those whose meager minds are always a threat to experimental knowledge. (2006, 27)

This rhetoric has been extremely strong in the stem cell debate, in which researchers are frequently described almost as if they are mad scientists operating outside the norms of society (Moreno and Berger 2006). Worries that scientists are playing God are partially concerns that they lack a sense of humility—the understanding of human weaknesses and limitations that is the hallmark of conservative thought. Neoconservative bioethicists believe that “humility, alas, is not always a prominent scientific virtue, at least among the most prominent scientists, and especially among many modern biologists” (Cohen 2006, 27).

And neoconservative critics of science also argue that scientists are so caught up in gaining knowledge about the world that they do not stop to think about the morality of their actions, or understand that science itself cannot answer those moral questions. Far from seeing science as value neutral (a widespread view among the general public), neoconservatives see it as value laden in a way that excludes many moral ends. Yuval Levin comments: “In forcing the world into this [scientific] form, science must necessarily leave out some elements of it that do not aid the work of the scientific method, and among these are many elements we might consider morally relevant.” (2006, 35) Leon Kass goes even further, arguing that “modern science rejects, as meaningless or useless, questions that cannot be answered by the application of method” (1993, 8). Echoing Randolph Bourne, Kass describes a cold, remorseless science reminiscent of the opening pages of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (a neoconservative favorite), asserting that “the so-called empirical science of nature is, as actually experienced, the highly contrived encounter with apparatus” and that “nature in its ordinary course is virtually never directly encountered” (1993, 7). These neoconservatives argue that scientists are too far removed from the world to properly consider the effects of their actions.

Neoconservatives see science and progressivism as so intertwined that the two are often combined in their minds, concerns about hubristic scientists mingling with old animosities toward leftist reformers. William Kristol (son of neoconservative founding father Irving Kristol) and Eric Cohen made the connection explicit in their discussion of therapeutic cloning supporters, describing them as “an odd mixture of the hubris of the medical researcher seeking to lead his fellow men beyond nature, and the sentimentality of the post-Communist romantic, who sees in genetic science man’s new hope for building a kind, just and liberated heaven on earth” (2002, 300). For neoconservatives, these impulses are one and the same, and both must be vigorously opposed.

Bioethics as a Model of Progressive Public Policy

Bioethics has a close connection to pragmatic progressivism, and is in many ways a progressive strain of the existing medial ethics community. The modern bioethics movement was in part a product of the human rights fervor of the later 1960s, and in part a result of a small group of thinkers’ concerns about the implications of the biological revolution that could be glimpsed over the horizon. What began as an academic conversation about genetic modification, reproductive technologies, replacing organs, sustaining life, and conducting human experiments quickly became a matter of law and public policy.

The new bioethics was distinct from traditional medical ethics not only in the problems it confronted, but also in its emphasis on the rights of patients and their families to make crucial decisions that historically had been made by physicians. In this respect it dovetailed with a growing public desire to open up medical decision making and to vest greater authority in the individual. Institutionally, the movement to create ethics committees at hospitals caught fire after the Karen Ann Quinlan case. Ethics committees represented a practical alternative to legal action when cooperation and communication between patients and caregivers broke down, or when the medical issues were of unfamiliar complexity. In acute clinical situations, academic theories have little leverage; the ethics committee process represents pragmatism at the “micro” level of the individual case (Moreno 1995). Thus, bioethics embodies such progressive values as pragmatic problem solving and the desire to make large, impersonal institutions more responsive to individuals.

At the “macro” level, no academic field has been so closely identified in its early and continued development with governmental advisory bodies as bioethics. Beginning with the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in the 1970s, and continuing through the President’s Council on Bioethics, these panels have attracted a great deal of attention from stakeholders and in some cases have created lasting policy frameworks, including regulations on the use of humans as research subjects, standards for informed consent, criteria for review of human genetic testing, rules on human reproductive cloning, and conditions for research involving human biological materials. To be sure, many of the proposals of these bodies had little or no influence, especially if they seemed to go beyond the readiness of the political system to accept them. From a sociological standpoint, it is important to note that the legitimacy of bioethics as a field was partly conferred by a series of bioethics commissions created by both Democratic and Republican administrations. These panels have not been limited to the presidential level; numerous bioethics advisory committees on special topics, including oversight of recombinant DNA experiments and human testing, have been created by various cabinet-level agencies. This reliance on advisory commissions reflects a progressive sensibility; President Theodore Roosevelt appointed the first presidential advisory committee. More important, the systematic approach taken by commissions—engaging knowledgeable experts in the process of assessing the problem at hand, hearing the views of various stakeholders, gathering evidence, and proposing new policy options—has come to be closely identified with progressive policymaking.

Of course, the pragmatic approach to bioethics has often been criticized as “instrumentalist” or merely means-oriented, and as too easily lapsing into a “thin” discussion about process rather than a “thick” discussion about ultimate goals and moral purposes (Evans 2002; Callahan 1996). Although we grant that in the public policy sphere important ethical considerations can too easily be swallowed up by procedural concerns, we reject the view that serious moral reflection about ends as well as means is incompatible with crafting public policy. The goal of making human beings more fully voluntary participants in research, for example, is embodied in the requirements for informed consent. The value of safety in studies of drugs and devices is realized in formal risk-benefit analysis. And, most important, progressivism respects the foundational value of a liberal polity that individuals should have maximal freedom, consistent with the public interest, to pursue their own vision of the good life. What the critics of bioethics view as succumbing to procedural norms, progressive bioethicists see as efforts to reconcile widely held values with respect for individual rights in a pluralistic democracy.

The justifiable criticism and self-criticism of the bioethics movement should not obscure the constructive innovations associated with the social practice of bioethics. Bioethicists have institutionalized the agenda of patients’ rights in the clinical setting, and they continue to raise concerns about patients’ rights. It would now be unthinkable—and contrary to professional and regulatory standards—for a hospital or a health-care organization to lack a mechanism for addressing ethical issues. Prior review of human research protocols by an ethics board is now a well-established international norm. An international community of scholars has recently launched an energetic movement to address questions of global ethics. And although neoconservatives have urged a thicker rationale for prohibiting human reproductive cloning beyond the risks to the fetus and the mother, the fact remains that the bioethics and life sciences communities have argued for a ban on attempts to clone a human being.

The social practices of bioethics therefore embody core progressive principles: that progress is possible, that pragmatism should prevail over ideology, that both individual rights and the common good can be respected and promoted, and that sound public policymaking requires a respect for evidence and a willingness to change familiar ways of operating. In the coming years, these principles will be needed to address challenges that arise from advances in personalized and regenerative medicine, stem cell research, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.

In order to adequately address the new biological changes that will be important issues in the twenty-first century, progressive bioethics must reflect the best in both progressivism and bioethics. It must retain progressivism’s optimism and drive, and it must retain a belief in the capacity of individuals and government to work together to solve even the largest of problems. Rather than shy away from challenges or hearken back to a bygone era, progressive bioethicists should engage with the world as it is and contemplate how it might be. But this optimism must be tempered by the lessons of the past and by an understanding of the complexity of many of the social and scientific problems that confront us. Progressive bioethics suggests a cautiously optimistic approach to science that acknowledges uncertainties but is not paralyzed by them.

Progressive bioethics must also remain non-ideological, unwedded to certain policy prescriptions as absolute truths, and not distracted by silver bullets that promise much but deliver little. It should be grounded in the best empirical evidence, staying true to the scientific method. Yet this lack of ideology should be restricted to means. Progressive bioethicists must maintain a clear sense of how they want the world to look, and why they want it to look that way. Furthermore, these goals must be subject to debate as new technologies or other changes alter the world we live in. The answers to these moral questions are not found within science, but they help to define science’s appropriate goals. Progressive bioethics must ensure that the excesses of science do not threaten society’s core values and must remember that the shared moral concerns of the community are as important as medical, economic, and political concerns.

Progressive bioethics recognizes the importance of expertise, particularly in science, and the capacity of a community of experts to be self- correcting. Just as transparency creates the best public policy and ensures accountability of leaders, so too does the openness of the scientific community allow for the best theories to be revealed through constant testing and challenge. Progressive bioethicists must ensure that this openness and accountability remains ever-present in expert communities. But they should also ensure that the limits of expertise are recognized. In a pluralistic democracy, no individual is an expert on how others should lead their lives or how society should be shaped. These determinations are instead made by the people as a whole through their individual everyday decisions, through their elected leaders, and through opportunities to participate in the public dialogue on issues of import. It is crucial that progressive bioethics ensure that opportunities for dialogue continue, whether through the presence of citizens on ethics panels or through active engagement with the citizenry on bioethics issues (as is currently being attempted in Britain in a variety of ways).

Progressive Values in Bioethics

Describing progressive bioethics through a series of specific policy deci- sions is next to impossible. Difficult with any overarching theory, it is even more so with one that is explicitly non-ideological and wedded to the fruits of inquiry with respect to particular cases. But it is possible to describe the sensibility of progressive bioethics—that is, the types of concerns that can and should inform bioethical discussions. The four major values of progressive bioethics are critical optimism, human dignity, moral transparency, and ethical practicality. These values do not lend themselves to any specific policy in perpetuity, but serve to shape the debate in ways that are evident in today’s discussions.

Critical Optimism
Progressive bioethicists are critical optimists. They understand the tremendous potential of science and technology to improve our lives and
our world. They recognize the benefits of penicillin, automobiles, and assisted reproductive technologies. But they also understand that technology and science are not unqualified goods. They remember the lessons of the atomic bomb and of dangerous human experimentation. Thus, they are oriented toward the potential good of the future, believing that on the whole science and technology have been extraordinarily positive forces in our world. Yet they do not forget that this is due in part to our efforts to constrain and shape those technologies, and, at times, to prohibit them. Science and technology are presumptively good, but they do not escape a critical examination of their costs and benefits. Progressive support for nanotechnology, while insisting on adequate safety and environmental standards, reflects such a view.

Human Dignity
The term ‘human dignity’ has recently taken on a new meaning. Conservatives have used it to describe vague concerns about new technologies that force us to reconsider strongly held beliefs. For progressives, ‘human dignity’ has its original meaning: that of supporting the rights of individuals on the basis of our sense of their shared moral worth as members of the human community (Caulfield and Brownsword 2006). Thus, progressive bioethicists do not insist on one vision of the good life, or impose a single moral belief system on everyone. Rather, they protect and promote the ability of individuals to pursue their own ends, provided they do not impede the ability of others to do the same. Progressive support for patients’ autonomy and for access to legal medical treatments and procedures reflects these dignity concerns.

Moral Transparency
For progressives, ethics is not a set of specific, immutable, unchanging laws applied the same way today as a hundred years ago. Rather, our ethics stem from values and beliefs whose expression continues to evolve as they are informed by advances in science, politics, art, culture, and society. New developments cause us to reconsider previously held assumptions, comparing them with our values and, at times, changing our notion of how those values should be expressed. Thus, progressive bioethicists are attuned to these changes, understanding that society may change its opinion on what is right as time passes. We seek to ground bioethical decisions in widely held norms within the community, particularly norms that arise from extensive and informed public debate. The purpose of progressive bioethics is not to impose values, but to help people see how their values can be realized in new contexts within a changing society. Progressive support for in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies that are broadly desired and understood reflects a belief in public ethics.

Ethical Practicality
As a type of applied ethics, bioethics must remain closely connected to the actual circumstances of our world. Rather than imagine doomsday scenarios of future dystopias or bright utopian futures that may never come to pass, progressive bioethicists must address the questions of the here and now. Of course, preparation can ease the introduction of future technologies into society, but this cannot distract progressive bioethicists from current problems. And we must not simply address these questions theoretically; we must seek to offer practical, realizable solutions. The medical concerns of the developing world, racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, and the powerful influence of industry on bio- medical science and regulation are all issues of great importance that may require messy solutions. Hearkening back to our pragmatist roots, progressive bioethicists must seek to productively address questions in the life sciences in ways that affect the actual world. Progressives’ concern with health care as a moral issue, not just an economic one, reflects this concern with practicality.

Toward a Progressive Bioethics

In many ways, there already is a semblance of progressive bioethics. A number of the values described as progressive are among the dominant views of the bioethics academy, including adherence to facts, protection of human dignity, and belief in the potential of science. They are the values that first defined the field, and they continue to hold prominent places in it. But progressive bioethics goes beyond these values. It gives greater prominence to voices that call for a return to concerns with social justice, to the protection of the least among us, and to an engagement with the everyday problems we see around us. It is a call to action, a prompting for bioethicists who share these values to take a more active role in the public and political debate around these issues. Constructively addressing the new moral challenges presented by the life sciences requires an openness to change, an inquiring spirit, and a sense of justice. That is the call of progressivism, one as powerfully inspiring today as it was a century ago.

Sam Berger and Jonathan D. Moreno, reprinted from Progress in Bioethics: Science, Policy, and Politics, edited by Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger, published by The MIT Press.

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The next day Oxford weather reverted to form, chilly and damp, but back home the world had changed. British colleagues, while offering congratulations, expressed their usual befuddled amusement at their old colonies’ reluctance to accept the notion of a decent public space. The Brits, of course, are soon to elect a new Parliament, and to the surprise of nearly everyone, the polls show that Labour might retain control, in spite of the massive unpopularity of the Brown government, worries about massive government debt, and a British Air strike ill-timed for Labour.

Even if the Tories pull it off one thing will not change. A couple of decades after Margaret Thatcher the National Health Service remains a popular institution. The welfare state that Churchill claimed was a “Gestapo” in the making is not in jeopardy more than 60 years on (though the tea partiers in the United States could well claim Churchill as their hero). Clement Attlee is not a world historical name, yet as prime minister he consolidated the social democracy that Brits wanted after the War. True, as one colleague observed at yet another pub meal, she was grateful to pay up for a private dentist when she needed a root canal, but no one at the table urged the end of the safety net NHS provides.

I was asked why Americans tend to look to the British way of providing health care when there are so many other models that are in many ways superior. The obvious answer is that we don’t speak French or German enough for them to be viable models, but in truth the Continental systems are both more highly rated for the health outcomes and more technologically advanced than the British. Whether we can “bend the curve” and control the rate at which health costs increase will depend to a great extent on science and technology. Systematic treatment comparisons will need to inform and guide health care decisions, even though outcomes data are often provisional. And the health reform legislation provides for just that in the form of a new institute that will study and compare the effectiveness of different clinical approaches. Information technology might someday improve those results but the platforms available now don’t seem to conform to the way doctors think or practice.

At the end of the day, however, at the current rate of expansion of our ability to intervene in an individual’s medical condition, no country will be able to afford “everything.” The ultimate approach to health care costs must be cultural and moral as well as technical: What do we owe each other?

Unless I have missed other news reports, U.S. conservative cries that the passage of health reform is socialism in the making have not yet turned either the Capitol or the House of Commons into the Kremlin. British democracy remains noisy, full of beans, with a raucous newspaper culture. From the British we can learn that a decent respect for the common good is not a form of tyranny. Perhaps we have taken the first step.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Oh what a difference a year makes. As The Washington Post has reported, all but one of the lines that were approved for research funding under the Bush administration is tied up in the NIH policy process, though more than 40 others have been approved. Why the slow going? Because the Obama administration is asking the ethical questions that didn’t seem to occur to the Bush administration, such as whether the embryos were donated to research with full informed consent. Instead, President Bush simply drew an arbitrary line on the calendar, coinciding with his August 9, 2001 address. Cells derived before this date were ineligible for use in federally funded research. Now who’s more reflective?

The irony, of course, is that the scientific community that so fervently supported candidate Obama is frustrated at the delay in approving cell lines. This frustration is understandable. The NIH working group assigned to review the provenance of human embryonic stem cells lines has a difficult task that needs to be done right. Of course, had the Bush administration or its bioethics council come to grips with the issues of informed consent that were already recognized by the Clinton administration in its stem cell policy, this matter could have been addressed eight years ago. Had that been the case, the researchers would not now be experiencing the current delays. Instead, the Bush policy succeeded mainly in kicking the can down the road.

This turn of events does not fit neatly into the recent cultural conservative narrative that views science and/or scientists (often the two are conflated) with skepticism. The point is not to turn all such social issues over to scientists, nor that any scientific community can be trusted always to do the right thing. Rather, in circumventing the normal policy process, the Bush administration overlooked some critical questions that the system could have addressed. Process might be boring and frustrating, but it’s often there for a reason.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

The founders of the United States of America were all well acquainted with the experimental nature of science, and they applied the same methods to their new political enterprise. “They always described the formation of the country itself as an experiment,” says Timothy Ferris, “And what isn’t widely understood is that the way that democracies work is by constant experiment.” Each election, each passage of a new law is, after all, a procedure designed to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to a government.

The Christian Science Monitor called Ferris “the best popular science writer in the English language today,” and his new book is The Science of Liberty. In it, he tells the story of the intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty. He recently joined Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan Moreno for a podcast interview to discuss how science rescued generations of humanity from subsistence living and brought freedom to nations around the world.

In the opening pages, Ferris lays down his bold claim: “The democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” Dissatisfied with existing histories of the Enlightenment, he set out to ascertain more specifically what exactly was new about the period bookended by the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. It wasn’t simply the embrace of reason, Ferris said, because after all, individuals can reason their way into all sorts of conclusions that don’t have anything to do with the nature of reality.

“Science was what was the new ingredient,” Ferris said, “And science isn’t just reason—it’s experimentation. The more I studied it, the more it seemed to me that this experimental approach is also the basis of liberal democracy.”

For this reason, Ferris likes to focus on a key event in the year preceding the 1688 installation of parliamentary rule in England. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia, the foundational text for classical mechanics and the laws of motion familiar to high school physics students. From this difficult book describing universal gravitation, Ferris drew a vector to the nascent idea of liberal democracy. “That book really sealed the deal,” he said, as it established the “tremendous predictive power of science.”

“Here was this new way of studying nature that disproved ancient authorities. It didn’t matter how great the authorities were,” he explained, “Aristotle could have said it—but you could conduct experiments that showed that Aristotle was wrong. And from that, it’s not much of a leap to say that, well, other forms of authority may be illegitimate as well.” Authorities like kings, as Thomas Paine would later point out in the run up to the American Revolution. Citizens of nations around the world owe their freedom to these scientific ways of thinking, which helped erode the legitimacy of monarchies.

The way we live now is virtually indistinguishable from the way people lived prior to the scientific revolution—life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Moreno said, describing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the “state of nature” without government. He explained that people alive during the middle ages had no perception that living standards could get better, in part because there was no progress in technology. “People did not have the notion that there could be change and improvement,” Moreno said.

The difference between that world and our current one is immense, Ferris emphasized. Moreover, science has continued to accelerate improvements in standards of living.

“The United States, at the time of its founding, was what would be called a third world country today,” Ferris said. “When the United States first started being called an ‘affluent society’ in the 1950s, Americans had less than half the money that they have now.” In the larger scheme of human history, we’ve come a long way in a very short time.

But in spite of all the knowledge, wealth, and freedom that flows from science, critics remain.

“Dogma ruled the world before science came along and it is still the preference of the majority of people in almost every country, and certainly here in the United States,” said Ferris.

But democracy is not a dogma. It is a method. “It is the most successful method of governance ever hit upon by humans, just as science is the most effective method of learning that’s ever been found,” he said.

In their discussion, Moreno and Ferris also explored the postmodern intellectual movement of the 1980s and 90s, which engulfed humanities departments at many universities, but unfortunately misinterpreted science and the democratic systems it supported. At its root, postmodernism is a critique of capitalism and its related economic, political, and cultural systems.

Ferris traces this problem to the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed. The European thinkers emerging from that crucible, he argues, sometimes turned away from democracy and toward socialism and a skeptical view about the power of science.

“What it appears to have done to European intellectuals, by and large, is to have persuaded them that the scientific, democratic world that had seemed to being doing so well going into the 20^th century had been proved to be a failure and even a sham and led to this hideous violence,” he said. Ferris is quick to point out that this is not true: “Prior to the rise of liberal democracy, the average person was less safe at home in bed in his little village than was the average resident of Western Europe during World War II.”

Moreover, Ferris said, there is a common misperception embedded in many threads of academic education that totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were particularly good at science. “The widespread claim that socialist systems generally—and even their communist, fascist varieties—were more efficient than democracies is not true,” he emphasized—the evidence just doesn’t support the claim. A careful study of Italian train records, for instance, revealed that Mussolini did not, in fact, make them run on time.

Postmodern rhetoric can sound at times like the claims of the intelligent design movement, Moreno said, saying that each rejects scientific expertise.

“The anti-science movement in this country, which includes the religious right and the radical left and many other elements,” replied Ferris, “Its program is simply to seize on any weakness it can find in the interface between science and society.” The recent embrace of global warming skepticism by creationists fits this pattern, with its denial of “belief” in climate change.

But standing up for the simple facts of our own history as a great democratic experiment doesn’t require belief in anything, Ferris contends. “It just requires an acquaintance with the historical facts of how we got to where we are now.”

Interview by Jonathan Moreno; summary and production by Andrew Plemmons Pratt.

Imagine that you are 13 years old and discover you are losing eyesight in the central portion of the visual field. There is hardly a part of the great adventure ahead, from learning to sports to dating, that is not changed forever by Stargardt’s Disease, an inherited disorder that resembles adult macular degeneration. A familiar trope of conservative critics of embryonic stem cell research was that regarding health problems as a crisis could provide ethical justification for just about anything. But how exactly is a young teenager’s degenerative eye disease not a crisis, not only for that child but for that family?

Medical intervention should not be the only response; parental support, counseling, classroom arrangements, and low vision devices are all important. Patients can and do live active and happy lives with a wide range of opportunities. There is no denying that we all live with disabilities or acquire them, nor that we cannot profit from life’s challenges.

And if regenerative medicine can offer a promising new therapy with reasonable risks to subjects, well, that’s not bad either. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration granted orphan drug status to cells derived from human embryonic stem cells by Advanced Cell Technology that will treat Stargardt’s. This bodes well for approval for a clinical trial.

This is not only an important step in normalizing the field as a regulated scientific activity. It also speaks to the sometimes-unpredictable ways that experimentation can address sources of human suffering. And it is a clear example of the way a smart regulatory system in a liberal democracy can respond to both a medical need and a market opportunity with no moral inconsistency.

Thus what is in some respects even more interesting than the fact that the company’s approach to a retinal disorder involves cells from embryos is that the FDA approval took place under the auspices of the Orphan Drug Act. The Act encourages innovative approaches to serious diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 Americans, conditions unlikely to attract private investment without additional incentives. The rare kind of macular degeneration that the therapy will attempt to alleviate afflicts mostly children. The idea—for which there is already support in laboratory and animal studies—is that embryonic stem cells can be pushed to become the retinal cells destroyed by Stargardt’s.

It was just early last year that biotech company Geron obtained permission from the FDA for the first embryonic stem cell trial. It will never be known how much of a chilling effect Bush administration policy had on the willingness of private companies to invest in the field, but conservatives and progressives alike understand that targeted, private-sector innovation is as critical for a healthy economy as it is for improving human life.

Someday therapeutic modifications in the gene that causes Stargardt’s Disease might be possible, but there might be too many harmful mutations to make direct gene therapy practical. That question, too, will surely be answered someday. Meanwhile, we may hope that the recent designation succeeds in moving the therapy forward and throws more light on this form of macular degeneration and on the lives of the kids who suffer from it.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

The ability to develop more complex artificial proteins is a reminder of the speed with which synthetic biology is developing. In “synbio,” biological parts like genes, proteins, and whole chromosomes are used to build new microscopic organisms that behave in certain ways, like producing specialized chemicals. Faster and cheaper DNA sequencing is a key technology that is making synbio practical for a range of purposes.

Previously scientists have been constrained in their experiments with proteins by the inability to introduce more than one modification at a time. The new technique developed at Cambridge enables significantly more flexibility by creating a parallel set of genetic information readable by specially modified ribosomes. Normally, ribosomes read messenger RNA in units of three nucleotides called codons, each of which corresponds to a specific amino acid. The altered ribosomes can also read “quadruplet codons” of four nucleotides and translate them into 256 protein building blocks.

Interestingly, the UK team tested their technique by culturing their new ribosomes with an antibiotic resistance gene with four codons. The designer ribosomes read the gene and produced the antibiotic resistance protein. Although the test selected surely seemed innocuous to the scientists, and is a standard way to assess such lab-designed alterations, one of the principle worries about synthetic biology is that novel biological weapons could be created by people with relatively modest lab skills who are malevolent or just careless. The biological parts or “biobricks” are in many cases available on the open market. Experts on biological weapons are concerned that antibiotic resistant organisms could be engineered either by nations or non-state actors.

Yet this research is crucial for a better understanding of cellular systems and for developing new and beneficial polymers. An encouraging example of openness and opportunity in the world of snybio was recently described in The New York Times Magazine, a 100-college competition called iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. As part of the contest, over 1,000 students learned how to use the tools of synthetic biology in order to make new products like more powerful pharmaceuticals, new fuel sources, nutrient-rich crops, or even biologically based computer monitors.

But what iGEM is mainly cultivating is the young engineering talent so badly needed at a time when people in their 20s are in danger of falling behind during a recessionary period. Research like that done at the Cambridge lab is the basic science needed for the iGEMers to do their applied work. The lesson here is that the lab doors need to be kept open.

The progressive response to synbio is more, not less, science. The more knowledge that is gained, the better prepared the scientific community is to establish a culture of responsibility, develop practical regulation, impose sanctions and, at the extremes, develop counter-measures for dual-use discoveries.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Seizing on the moment for a light-hearted comment I said, “And perhaps we can get everyone here to come to America.”

Immediately the professor, sitting at the back of the room, raised his hand, smiled broadly and said, “But we’re going to bring them back!”

The point was not lost on anyone. That was 2005; even a few years before that his statement would not have been credible. I have been in China twice since then with the opportunity to see through a tiny window into the Chinese commitment to the life sciences. My impression is that their confidence has only increased.

The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos has provided an excellent brief comment on the growth of science in China, including a fascinating note about Mao’s skepticism concerning the scientific elite. Congress in the early nineteenth century was also skeptical about supporting gentlemen inventors out of the federal purse. The main sticking point was a constitutional debate about the authority granted the federal government to engage in “internal improvements.” A proposal for a national university to be located in Washington, though apparently a dream of George Washington, was caught in this debate. When scientific work presented specific and tangible advantages for their constituents, congressmen were supportive, but there were few such projects or opportunities in those days. One exception was the coastal survey, which aided in safe navigation and therefore commerce. Politicians were both willing and eager to support a project that brought concrete benefits to their own states. Similarly, a perceived need for nuclear weapons in the 20^th century moved China to develop a sophisticated physics infrastructure.

Both the quality as well as the quantity of Chinese science is rapidly improving. Their system enables focused investment and rapid adjustment to new opportunities. Although I have written that America’s cultural advantages should keep us in the lead for a long time to come by most metrics (publications, patents, etc.), we need to consider whether we are doing enough to leverage the strengths that China can bring for our own benefit. Mostly we think in competitive terms, about the quality of our science and engineering preparation. But we should also be thinking in ways that account for the cooperative nature of science. For example, is our immigration policy keyed to the best and the brightest in emerging science and technology? Is our visa system as flexible as it could be? What about language instruction and cultural exchange? Although the international language of science is English, there are good interpersonal reasons for at least some of our young scientists to have incentives to learn Chinese. What reforms need to be made in our intellectual property regime or regulatory systems to ensure maximum flexibility and enhance the investment climate while also providing adequate protections here and abroad? What sorts of transparency should we insist upon with our Chinese partners to keep the playing field level and humane, especially in sensitive areas like human research protection?

There is no reason for us to fear for our scientific advantage, but we should be resolute. One Chinese university official told me he is disturbed that so many of their medical students are still lost the United States for the long term. The tide is rising but the geology is still in our favor if we have vision and wit to build upon in a sustainable way.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

But sound science is driven by evidence rather than ideology; in that way it often surprises. A report from a French team effectively closes the circle on the skin-cells-to-stem-cells process by reporting that they have accomplished the reverse: mouse embryonic stem cells were used to generate a fully functional layer of skin. This work has tremendous implications for patients waiting for grafts from their own skin, as these people are vulnerable to life-threatening infections in the interim.

Just as this paper appeared The Lancet, the life sciences world was on edge, waiting to see if the regents of the University of Nebraska medical school would vote to turn back the clock, limiting Cornhusker scientists to the 21 embryonic stem cell lines approved by the Bush administration. The apparent sanctity of those cell lines is based on a morally arbitrary line in the calendar due to the scheduling of President Bush’s famous stem cell address to the nation.

There were so many things wrong with this idea it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately the motion failed on a tie vote of the university regents. However, the incident did show, once again, how morally vacuous posturing can overtake science policy. The fact is that no one knows where the science could lead. If the history of medicine is a guide, what is most likely is that there will be a menu of cell lines that will have come from different sources via a variety of processes, each with their advantages and disadvantages, risks and benefits. Reality has a way of trumping rhetoric.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Of course we’ve heard this before, especially with reference to Japan. As I’ve traveled around the country this past week many conversations have touched on two topics: the recent change in government and the efforts by the new, more liberal administration to confront the corruption and waste that are contributing to Japan’s version of our economic crisis. Then there are references to the “lost decade” that still shadows the diminished Japanese giant. Far fewer companies are paying for those infamous thousand dollar lunches in the Ginza, let alone financing leisurely chats at the disappearing geishas. The purchase of Rockefeller Center that so shook Americans seems as remote as the Shogun.

To be sure, China is not Japan, but it’s easy to get caught up in the criteria of the moment. Next month I will be in Beijing for the third time in four years, where the air is indeed thick with excitement about the next Shanghai tower and robust economic growth. But atmospheric Beijing restaurants frequented by Western expats and visiting scholars are also full of talk about continuing unrest in rural areas, environmental catastrophe, the lack of a leadership succession, and the Communist party’s anxiety about any incident that could trigger another Cultural Revolution, which still cannot be discussed in public.

Yet it is true that, for the moment at least, America’s self-confidence has been shaken. Worries that something is deeply wrong with the country were nearly universal in the late 1960s, and the 1930s, and so again in the early 2000s. Brooks is right that rekindling an innovation economy focused on regional clusters would go far to making Americans productive and optimistic again; that is exactly the cause we’ve championed at Science Progress. It’s also the orientation that can distinguish the American spirit from the Chinese system, which so far still lingers far behind as an innovation center.

One element of the American story that Brooks fails to mention that has been key to our success is immigration. Even the Japanese scientists I’ve spoken with agree that Chinese students are far more likely to spend virtually all their time at their work. A Japanese grad student told me that universities have had to remove makeshift beds from the labs so that Chinese students would stop sleeping there and stimulating rumors of sexual harassment. China has not shown that its system can unleash the combination of ambition and creativity that has long found such fertile soil in the United States—and in my view it never will. We should refocus our efforts on continuing to attract new waves of new Americans who can re-energize the American future and remind us why we came to America in the first place.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

That none of this is true seems almost beside the point. Americans are getting nervous and that is not good news for health care reform. Supporters of reform are now working overtime to reassure us that health care reform will not make us worse off, that it will instead improve the quality of the care we get, and that if we like what we have, we can keep it. Health care reform will not change, in any way that matters to us, the self-interested world we each inhabit.

At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, we want to try a different tack. Each of us should support health care reform because it is the right thing to do.

We should say at the outset that although we do ethics for a living, we are neither impartial nor indifferent to the needs of those we love. When someone in our families is ill, we do every thing in our power to get them every medical intervention whose benefits outweigh the harms. We desperately want them to have the best. And because we have excellent employer-sponsored insurance, and have the resources to pay for whatever out of pocket costs there might be, we usually succeed.

But we are always painfully aware that what we can do for our families, many other people cannot. And we are also aware that there is no morally defensible reason why we are in this position and they are not. Our system is just unfair.

Most of us who have insurance—whether through our employers or through Medicare—do so because the government pays a big chunk of the bill. Most of us who don’t have insurance don’t qualify for the tax breaks that go along with employer-sponsored health insurance and are just too young for Medicare.

Not that insurance insulates a family from the staggering financial burdens of a serious illness. If you are happy with your health insurance it may be because no one in your family has ever had advanced cancer, serious arthritis, a debilitating brain accident, or any number of illnesses or injuries where the cost of care can exceed by tens of thousands of dollars a year your insurance benefits. Putting aside the contentious issue of whether those wealthy enough to absorb such costs deserve to be that much better off, surely in a country as rich as ours no family should have to be in the awful position of being unable to secure critical medical care because they cannot afford it.

So what does this have to do with a personal moral responsibility to support health care reform? We each have a duty to take care of our loved ones and that extends, of course, to making sure that what is good and valuable about the health care they now have is preserved. But don’t be misled into thinking you are being asked to trade away your family’s interests. The next time you hear how health care reform is going to get between you and your doctor or deny you needed care, press for specifics. Despite the hype, the proposals currently being debated in Congress impose minimal or no burdens on most of us. Indeed, we will be more secure with health care reform than we are now. After all, while we may be healthy or have good insurance today, that may not be the case tomorrow.

But even if, in the near term, some of us may be slightly worse off than we are today, there is a line between appropriate self interest and simple selfishness. Opposing health care reform crosses that line.

This is a case where we can have our moral cake and eat it too. In supporting health care reform, we can be good citizens and morally responsible neighbors, and still do right by those we love. We want a country in which all families, not just ours, have affordable, high quality health care. Don’t you?

Ruth R. Faden is the Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Sam Brownback (R) wants to make sure that the United States government prevents the creation of human-animal monstrosities that could destroy humankind.

For years Sen. Brownback has been worried about mixing human and animal tissues for scientific purposes. In 2005 he introduced the Human-Animal Chimera Prohibition Act, which would have imposed civil and criminal penalties for making certain kinds of laboratory animals. The unintended consequences of this bill would have included severely hampering medical research on serious human diseases like Alzheimer’s that seem to have a genetic component.

Although barely noticed at the time, Brownback’s concerns got enough attention in the Bush White House to earn a reference in the 2006 state of the union address, in which the president called for banning human-animal hybrids. The remark excited little public comment, perhaps because it was so odd, and it certainly didn’t earn President Bush any more points with a scientific community that already held him in low esteem.

At the time I suggested that the White House speechwriters didn’t seem to know the difference between a hybrid and a chimera. All hybrids are chimeras because they involve mixtures from two sources, but hybrids are a special kind of chimera in which the genes themselves are mixed.  A familiar example of a hybrid is a mule, a sterile animal that is produced by mating a horse with a donkey.  Chimeras range from people with heart valves from pigs to people who resulted from fused embryos to once-pregnant women who carry some fetal cells with them the rest of their lives to the valuable lab animals I mentioned.

Apparently Senator Brownback has learned the difference between chimeras and hybrids. His new bill specifically “does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to treat patients.” So the senator wants to ensure that the genetic makeup of human beings is not altered by some sort of animal combination, which would be “a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”

Conceding the dignity problem for the sake of argument, it’s hard to understand how a race of mermaids would be an injustice, certainly not to the mermaids themselves.

As a presidential primary candidate Sen. Brownback expressed his doubts about evolution. One wonders how he would square that position with his worry about the potential development of the human germline. Anxious about blurring species boundaries, the senator also likes to tout his background in agriculture that has given him expertise in genetic engineering of crops and livestock. It’s probably time for him to take a refresher course in animal husbandry, since speciation remains a poorly understood process. Genetics turns out to be only one component, and there are various ways to define a species.

Brownback has announced that he is leaving the senate to run for governor of Kansas. One might have expected that Kansas would, in a Brownback administration, be the first state to outlaw human-animal hybrids. But the (non-hybridized) Sunflower State is not the pioneer in preventing a pollution that could ultimately produce centaurs or the planet of the apes. Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal already signed a bill into law that would protect the Bayou State from such a fate, seemingly inspired by Sen. Brownback’s scary vision. Apparently bi-partisanship does not count as a suspect hybrid, since Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu has signed onto the Brownback bill.

Some years ago the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the difference between modern and pre-modern states is that in the former sovereignty is claimed over life rather than death. Foucault would have delighted in this example of the exercise of sovereign authority over human bodies, and not just current ones, but those in the distant future as well. But do the conservative extremists who support this kind of nonsense appreciate that using state power to keep the human race pure serves the same eugenic purpose that they commonly attribute to the left?

The proposed protections are incomplete. They only cover human-animal monstrosities made within our borders. I propose the “Human-Animal Hybrid Immigration Prohibition Act of 2009.”

Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.