 Thank you John. The hour is late and you came here to hear Professor Peters and not I. I will give him a somewhat shorter introduction than I originally planned. I won't be able to do justice to him but certainly some things need to be said. Among the scholars working carefully on the interface between theology and science, Professor Ted Peters is unquestionably in the forefront of this line of research. Holding a PhD from the University of Chicago, he's Professor of Systematic Theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and also Research Professor at the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences also in Berkeley. He is a prolific author with nine books to his credit, two more in process, and well over a hundred published articles. He has made major contributions in eschatology, Trinitarian theology and ethics as well as in the field of science and theology. In the field of science and theology, Ted has made major contributions in bioethics, particularly genetics. His recent book for the love of children, Genetic Technology and the Future of the Family, arises from his participation in the important University of Chicago project on religion, culture and family. He served as principal investigator for the NIH research project on theological and ethical questions raised by the Human Genome Project, which is the subject of next year's Nobel conference. He is also conversant in issues of cosmology, physics and theology, the subject of last year's Nobel conference, and is currently editing a book entitled Science and Theology, The New Consonance. And in an era in which many pastors and church leaders are ignorant of science or apathetic about science, he shares these insights with future pastors in a seminary setting. I wish we had more like him. There is much more that can and should be said about Ted Peters, but the most recent is the most exciting. His book, Playing God, question mark, Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom, has just won the highly prestigious Templeton Foundation Award as one of the two best books in science and religion for 1997. We are very fortunate to have him with us here today. He will address us on co-evolution, pain or promise. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ted Peters. It's an honor for me to be here with distinguished scientists. It's also an honor to be working with Richard Elvie. Richard, some years ago, stumbled on the secret, the secret that good science, good science understood as the honest pursuit of truth, good science is itself a godly activity. You don't have to paint it over with religion to think of it as divine. And so these Nobel Conferences have taken a cocktail of science and spiked it with a little theology, just so that secret could be made known. Now I work every day in the field of science and religion, and when I think about the third of a century that Dick Elvie has put in to his pioneering work, I think of him as nothing short of heroic. Stand up, Dick. It's nice to be here at Gustavus Adolphus and reconnect with my collegial friend, Garrett Paul, and to meet Andrew Carlson, a senior who will be in a future scientist and bioethicist. And I've met a number of you in the audience, but I think my favorite is a man whose name I've forgotten. But he came up yesterday and introduced himself and said, I'm a pastor, and I've just retired for health reasons. My congregation got sick of my preaching. My topic is on co-evolution, and I want to ask some questions, and I'm not absolutely confident that I have the right answers. But the basic question is this. How is it that we in the human race can live at peace in a world where we're threatened with infection by viruses? Or maybe to frame it in a slightly different way, could the concept of evolution or co-evolution itself provide us with some comfort in the face of suffering, the suffering that is caused by the invasion of a virus? Yesterday, John Hollins said that evolution is a fact, not a theory, and he finds nature understood in Darwinian terms to be beautiful. And there's no doubt that the theory of evolution provides a rich and fruitful research program for science, but let me just go one step further and ask, is there enough there to found a spirituality? Is there enough there to deal with the deep human questions that arise in the face of a world of virus? Now, as you know, some people think of evolution as a fishy topic, and in Berkeley, where I come from when we have ideological wars, they are fought on the backs of cars with bumper stickers and symbols on trunks. And as you're probably aware, the fish is a symbol for Jesus Christ. It comes from the ancient Greek acronym, ichthles, which is the word for fish, and the odes for Jesus, the chi for Christ, the theta for God, the upsalon for the sun, and the sigma for Sotir. Now there are in my part of the country, and I was at least one person here in St. Peter that don't exactly like this, and so we end up with another fish, a Darwin fish, and you'll see those little legs there as it comes out of the sea and climbs up onto the evolutionary ladder. Well, one would expect retaliation, and there is, and so there we have a Jesus fish. Now, this is the chapter of the story where we currently find it. I wonder what will happen next month. This is the UFO version of the evolutionary ladder. We all want to be on the top of the chain. But what I want to get at is the question raised by the relationship between death and life. And I took this picture on one of my Sierra Mountain backpacks. It's a dead and rotting sequoia. But as you can see right in the middle, it is providing in its death nourishment for the life, the new life of another sequoia tree. Theologians have to ask that question. What's the meaning of death, especially when it appears to be a cost for someone else's life? Well, let's take a brief look at Jean-Jean co-evolution. I certainly cannot add anything of substance scientifically to what has already been said in the last couple of days. Here's the influenza virus. And those of you with really sharp eyes have probably noticed how Axel Stoyer has his trained squadron of flies that come and have been hovering around those of us who are speaking. And I think that the purpose of the flies is to illustrate the viral swarm. But it all reminds me of a little poem my father had when I was growing up. He says, There once was a little fly named ENZA. I opened the screen door and in flu ENZA. This is a T cell in the process of dying due to the invasion of the HIV. Now, why do I have a picture of my front yard with our cat and rabbit? And Bill Yoclick alluded to the rabbit story in Australia, which many pick up as a kind of paradigmatic illustration of co-evolution. In the 1850s some British gentlemen introduced rabbits into Australia for the purpose of supporting the hunt. But they must have been pretty bad shots because the rabbits grew in population and without any natural predecessors by 1950, there were just too many of them. And so there was a cry for getting rid of them and So they brought a rabbit virus from Brazil to Australia, Micsoma. And within three months, as I understand it, that 99.8% of the rabbit population died, leaving only 0.2% remaining. By 1957, however, the rabbit population had returned and it was now strong and only 25% of those rabbits were now susceptible to that particular virus that through genetic selection we had a whole new relationship between the rabbit population and the virus. Could this be a way for us to look at the long story of human evolution and could we see such stories as the rabbits and countless other chapters in the human story as examples of moving towards a mutualistic symbiosis, a statistical symbiotic relationship between the human race and its viral partners. One such author who wants to think in this fashion says a virus begins as a lethal attacker yet given time it ameliorates its behavior through co-evolution until after many generations of both virus and host a totally new modus vivendi emergence, a true symbiosis in place of what was formerly a predator and prey relationship. I guess my question for this afternoon is to ask if that's the way it works, if that's the way nature works, and if that is what has brought us to this particular point in evolutionary history, what does it mean? Should we be learning from this? Should we be celebrating it? Or should we be looking for other sources in which to pose the question of human meaning in life? What I would like to suggest, at least by description, if not by prescription, that we human beings are more than our biological natures. We are thorough goingly physical to be sure, but we are more than what we are physically. We are more than our evolutionary past. There are ways in which we as human beings transcend what has been given to us, what we have inherited, and we experience that transcendence in the form of freedom, and I would like to talk about two examples of freedom, two forms of freedom, Promethean freedom and spiritual freedom, and I'll explain what I mean by those. First, Promethean. You're probably familiar with the ancient Greek myth of how Prometheus was a titan at the time that the world was being created, and that Prometheus saw that the world was in darkness, and up in the heavens he saw the gods enjoying the warmth and the light of the sun, and he thought, if I sneak up there and I lighten my torch on the sun and bring it back down to the darkness of earth, then we'll be able to light candles and bonfires, and fireplaces, and maybe we can make oil lamps so that people attending Nobel conferences at Gustavus Adolphus can have light in the middle of the afternoon. Prometheus was successful. It is both clever and shall we call it Promethean adventure. He brought fire to earth, but he raised the ire of the gods Zeus. How dare Prometheus. Enter the realm of the gods where he ought not to come, and we must punish him for his arrogance, for its pride, for his hubris, and so Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle every day could come and feast on his liver. This is a contemporary Japanese Prometheus. Well, that's not where the story ends. The story continues because Prometheus had a younger brother named Epimetheus, and now if you take those names apart, you'll see that the word Prometheus means to think ahead. P-r-o means ahead, and Mothine is the verb to think. Prometheus was one who thought ahead. That's why he could anticipate the need that the planet earth had for the fire of the sun. What about that name Epimetheus? E-p-i means what? After, right? Epimetheus means afterthought, and he was described as slow-witted. And Prometheus said, you know, I think Zeus has kind of ticked off, so Epimetheus be careful if he sends you any gifts, don't take them. Well, Zeus sent Epimetheus a gift in the form of the first woman named Pandora, and Pandora was so beautiful that once Epimetheus laid eyes on her, he married her and took her into his house. But Pandora had curiosity, and she opened the box, and when she opened the box, out flew all of the evils of the world. Disease, and plague, and war, probably those viruses. And when she slammed down the lid on the box, there was only one thing remaining in the box. Maybe Bob Gallo and the doctor's navel are still in that box, because they certainly gave us some hope today. Well, Prometheanism is a form of freedom. It's a form of transcendence. It's a form of saying, I'm not going to accept the world as I find it. I'm going to move beyond it. And of course, Prometheans are highly criticized, especially in our own day and age, especially in the field of genetics, why? Because that kind of transcendence can mean overstepping some sacred bounds. It can mean that nature or the gods will rebound against us and punish us for our arrogance. Be that as it may, Prometheanism is a way of describing the sense of freedom that we as a human race find incarnate in the scientists who lead us forward. Let me give you a couple of examples looking ahead to next year when you're going to be looking at the human genome project. A couple of the Prometheans that I've made contact with are here. This is Mary Claire King, who's a geneticist, your biologist, formerly at the University of California, Berkeley. Recently left to go to the state of Washington. Mary Claire has worked for nearly two decades now on one highly focused project. She used to say, I'm going to find the gene that causes, or that is responsible for, inherited breast cancer in women. And she suspected that it was on chromosome 17. It was later proven to be the case. And she used to say, if I can find the gene for inherited breast cancer, and if I can find the switch that turns it on and off, and if I can come up with a pharmaceutical, that will keep that gene turned off. No woman in this country will ever have to suffer from inherited breast cancer again. Now that's Promethean transcendence. It's a way of saying we have inherited something from our evolutionary history, but our future is going to be different. Well, she wasn't the actual first person to find the gene somebody else did, but because the other scientists were relying upon her research, they let her name it. It's now known as BRCA, BRCA1, and you'll say BR, breast, CA, cancer, of course. But if you'll take a look at her chart, there are chromosome 17. You'll see that it's also Berkeley, California. No coincidence. I'd like to show just two minutes of a film clip, and this will be of Francis Collins, who heads the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, and it comes out of a PBS special called Faith and Reason, which just aired a couple of weeks ago in the month of September, and in this clip, you'll see Francis Collins, who will give a testimony to his own faith in God, but at the same time say that faith mandates a responsibility that we as human beings have. For human health and improving human welfare. The voice, the narrator's voice is that of Margaret Bertheim, who's the one who made the made the documentary. Could we have this tape, please? Government has committed three billion dollars for this effort. Research is coordinated at the National Institutes of Health by leading gene scientists and religious believer, Dr. Francis Collins. My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for the thick fibrosis and honeycombs disease and neurofibromatosis. So I come at this from the point of view of somebody who would like to see the long list of human genetic diseases that afflict far too many people, understood better, treated, and eventually cured. As a boy, Dr. Collins attended an Episcopalian church, but in college he became an atheist. At the age of 27, however, after reading the works of the English Christian writer C.S. Lewis, he was converted. I became convinced that this was the decision I wanted to make and I became by choice a Christian, a serious Christian, who believes it. Well, I think you can imagine what I described, right? Now ordinarily one does not put the Greek Titan Prometheus together with Christian motivations for pursuing things. But I think that what we see here, both in Prometheus and in Francis Collins and in people of goodwill in general and certainly the dedicated researchers in the sciences, is on the one hand a great love and respect for the natural world of which we are totally immersed in a part, and also the sense of transcendence. We have an obligation to use our science in order to make human life better, in order to relieve human suffering, and the laboratory science and medical research and the doctor's care all belong together. It's a form of freedom, freedom both in continuity with yet transcendence over the natural world. As we think about the topic for this Nobel conference, I notice that there are a couple of different sort of language games at work. One is co-evolution, and as I've suggested, many people who like to think in terms of co-evolution use language such as what? Mutual symbiosis, the kind of new harmonious relationship to be understood between the human and the non-human. And we also get what? Dedicated Prometheus language that borders on the apocalyptic as we worry or get ourselves concerned about emerging viruses and the threat that maybe a pandemic like that of the 1918 influenza virus might engulf the world one more time and shouldn't we get ready? Just reminds me a little bit of the these are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse here from Revelation Chapter 6, international war and civil war, economic depression, and the pale horse death. But we get the warrior imagery and the fight against AIDS, defeating AIDS. What will it take? The war against the the microbes. Oh, yes, there's a big distance from the lab bench through the media to how it is in the wider culture that we understand what's going on with natural science. But on the other hand, we've got genuinely got this double relationship. On the one hand, we are nature. We have inherited our natural past. Yet at the same time, there is a sense of transcendence. A sense that we, through our scientific research and through better healthcare, can have some influence on the evolutionary future of our own species. Well, I can't read it because of the angle that I'm up here, but it's the suggestion that some things in science are wrongity wrongity wrong, and the version of it that we're that we're getting in our own time is the fear of Prometheanism, and the fear comes in two forms. On the one hand it's sort of the Sierra Club fear. Look, if we try to transcend nature too much, we will lose the sensitivity of being at one with the natural world, and then the second form in which it comes is the Frankenstein myth and its new versions. Namely, if we try to tinker too much, if we try to meddle too much with the essence of life, like Zeus strapping Prometheus to the rock, nature will fight back. Nature will fight back, and it will come roaring back with great destructive force. So it's the playing God syndrome. Thou shalt not play God as the new commandment, and Jurassic Park becomes the way in which it appears on the movie screen. And so it's not as though science is wrong. It's the question our society is asking. Is there a point at which we should put on the brakes? Is there a point at which the relationship between science and society itself ought to have some influence on the direction that science goes? My point here is not to argue for one policy or another, is to say where we find ourselves as a human race is in a delicate situation of both being children of our evolutionary history, and at the same time having a vision of transcendence that will carry us beyond it. That's Promethean freedom. Now let me turn to spiritual freedom. By spiritual freedom here, I'm not suggesting disembodied ghosts that fly around. No, I'm accepting and assuming that we are fully and completely physical beings. But by spiritual freedom, I mean what the theologian Paul Tillich meant when he said that freedom is being able to act out of a centered self, to deliberate, to evaluate, to make judgments, to make decisions, and take actions that come out of the centered person. We are more than our genes. We are more than our evolutionary history. Well, we are a whole, as a person, we are a whole greater than the sum of our parts, and let's take a look for a couple of moments. At that understanding of freedom, as we ask the question about human suffering. Now while I was working on this paper to come here, the Jehovah's Witnesses knocked at my door, actually they rang the bell, and they handed me this, and did I want to buy it for 20 cents? And I said, yes, I've been thinking about this particular issue, and by the way, do you think God really does care for us? Oh, yes, he does, they said, and I said, good, I'll buy it for 20 cents. I think the Jehovah's Witnesses are right. God does care for us, but the kind of a task the systematic theologian sets for himself or herself is to say, now just how does that work? What does that mean? How is it that we know that God cares for us? And the answer is not all that easy. Here we have William Blake's Job. Job in the Old Testament was a person who suffered. Did he suffer from a virus? Well, biblical scholars have looked at that. They think maybe it was a series of ulcers caused by a bacterium. Be that as it may, in addition to physical disease, Job suffered a number of social problems, such as losing all of his money and having his family die, and as Job's problems increased in their severity and in their length, he began to feel alone, and he was in great pain, and he was angry, as all of us would get when we find ourselves alone and in pain and not being able to see any end, and he, like Dick Elvie a few moments ago, shook his fist at heaven. He complained, he says, my flesh is clothed with worms and dirt, my skin hardens, and then breaks out again, like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages. So I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are a portion to me. No matter how bad it got, no matter how much Job suffered, we remember Job because he didn't give up. His wife said, Job, it's so bad you should curse God and die, and Job said, naked I came into this world, and naked I will leave it, blessed be the name of the Lord. So we can think of Job as one for whatever reason, had the faith and the courage to maintain his interior strength in the face of horrendous suffering. Well, I think about Job, when I go over to the art exhibit and look at Sukho's depictions, as many of you have, of the sufferers from AIDS. Yes, we must look at AIDS scientifically. We must understand how that virus invades and infects, but millions of people individually suffer the effects of that, as they do with Ebola, influenza, and others. And they are left alone, tragically, alone, to face their own pain and their own death. What does that mean? Some are stronger, some are weaker. All of us know that with the contingencies of life that any one of us could be in that situation at any time. And at one level it looks as though a disease such as this will what, wipe away our freedom as soon as we get the diagnosis. Yet we can observe that there are some people as centered cells who seem to be able to transcend it, take it into themselves, and make a decision, make a decision, so to speak, to face their own destiny with courage. Karl Rahner, the Roman Catholic Theologian, calls this the liberty of the sick. The freedom experienced by a person who confronts death in a self-constituting way. It is best for us to die consciously, says Rahner, if it is possible. More than merely to suffer our death, we should paradoxically suffer it actively as an act of freedom. And because death has a way of stopping time, of making the end of our own finite existence, it functions to define us. Death is the final point at which we in our personal history on earth are finished. It is an achievement of freedom if we in advance consciously take this finality up into ourselves and affirm ourselves ahead of time. This describes the Christian conviction that in death a person's free history assumes final form. This means that the final judgment of the person takes place to live is to live freely. None of this is easy, yet we have to ask the question, where is it that human transcendence takes place? Is the statistical comfort of knowing that my death, or the death of tens of thousands of individual, alone and suffering victims of HIV, serves a larger purpose of a mutual symbiosis at a future stage of human evolution? Is that enough? 17th century Spanish painting of a healing miracle of Jesus. The word for salvation and the word for healing come from the same shared root. And one thing that is very important, but still somewhat mysterious for me, is how on the one hand the ministry of healing, whether it comes at the hands of our faithful doctors, whether it comes at the hand of God directly, that the ministry of healing is something we feel physically and we know what that is. We know how wonderful it is to be healed and liberated from a disease. Yet at the same time, our minds make a kind of spiritual jump that says that's not salvation. It's like healing, but salvation is something more than that. Because there are those rare instances, I don't know how rare they are, where a person does not get healed and still feels saved. What is it that makes that move? What is it that gives us that transcendent jump? There's no answer to my question, is there? We have a backup. Let's see if we can find Jesus on the cross. We have a little help on the slides, please. This painting was painted clandestinely in Auschwitz. And those of you who know much about the Auschwitz history can recognize that the loincloth here is the blue and white checkered uniform that inmates in Auschwitz had to wear. The artist died in Auschwitz and it hangs now in a small town in southern Poland. A speculative question that people in my circle ask is the following. Granted that the debate between the scientific creationists and evolutionary theorists needs to be set aside and marginalized. And accepting what John Holland said, namely, evolution is the way nature works. Could it be said that God uses the evolutionary history of the human race to accomplish divine purposes? Now that kind of question is just shot through and through with dangers. The first one of which, of course, is that the scientific investigation of evolution presupposes no purpose. There is no purpose. Things are random. Things are unsupervised, the selection process. So you can't use purpose when you're looking into the subject matter. Another, what, danger lurking in that question is, is it God's purpose to produce beings or species which are more evolutionary fit than others? And the third danger is one that Charles Darwin himself alerted us to and almost did us a theological favor by saying that natural selection is without purpose and please your theologians, don't try to put purpose in here, because he said, take a look at the massive amount of human, massive amount of suffering over the eons of time, that the cost and the suffering of sentient beings and species, entire species that have to die out is so great that if one wants to argue that God's purposes are being done through evolutionary advance you'd have to say that either God is a very poor biological engineer or simply so apathetic, so unfeeling about suffering to allow it to occur on such a large scale. I asked the question, how is it that we would know something about God in relationship to these matters? And I would like to point at least in part to one small aspect of the Gospel and that's the sense that God manifested here in the suffering of Jesus Christ shares the suffering of his sentient creatures with them, with us. Jesus Christ is Emmanuel. Jesus didn't get healed in this case. Jesus suffered, was unable to avoid it. I don't think that he's evolutionarily more fit than others even though that's a debatable issue. And as I think back towards the long evolutionary history, where is God going to take a stand? With those more fit than others, I don't want to deny that, but I just have to ask wouldn't there be some divine compassion for the victims? Whether they be rabbits or whether they be human? Martin Luther in pondering the significance of the death of Jesus Christ said it is correct to talk about God's death. It could be said God dead, God's passion, God's blood, God's death. I guess what I want to do without being able to answer all the questions is say if this be true about God, when we look for the relationship between God and nature there's going to be something about divine compassion that is going to be on the suffering side of the ledger. Finally, there is at least within the Christian vision and certainly within the Promethean vision reason for hope. If there is a purpose within the long evolutionary history of the past and if there is going to be a purpose in the evolutionary future of the human race and whatever it is that may transcend us in time I think that purpose will probably come from the outside and not from the inside from God's will and from God's future. The concept of co-evolution may be intellectually satisfying it may be suggestive of further scientific research may even lead to a holistic picture of mutual symbiosis between the human and the virus yet it has a limit I think it simply cannot speak adequately to the profound existential need for us as individuals to confront the loneliness and injustice of pain, suffering, and death. Is there a promise of peace somewhere else? Perhaps. Some promise can be found in human freedom but what kind of freedom? Promethean freedom holds out its own form of promise for the human race as a collective our research virologists and medical doctors and healthcare delivery institutions hold out promise that new vaccines and new therapies will save lives. Such past and projected medical achievements represent the triumph of human freedom they represent transcendence of our natural history and they represent human co-creative power for influencing our evolutionary future yet as respectable and glorious as Promethean freedom can be I want to point out a counterbalancing freedom that only individuals can enjoy and namely spiritual freedom spiritual freedom places promise squarely within the pain and draws life from it the promise within the pain is God and God's self incarnate in Christ and spiritually present to us in our courage to affirm our true selves even in the face of the worst of adversity thank you very much it was very easy it was easier to spell I could say each of you would say you would say two to three minutes two minutes tell a story say a kind of thank you for whatever they're very well received dinner crowd is only three hundred story we need a little ushering get rushing to stage okay we're going to address questions to both the navels and to Dr. Peters for questions so we'll have a mixture of questions I suppose potpourri, potpourri of questions panelists, speakers, do you have questions of either doctors navel or Dr. Ted Peters go ahead, Dr. Holland I wanted to ask Elizabeth whether when you got regression of some of those nodules did you see distant regression and un-injected nodules? in one individual we did there was regression of pulmonary or lung nodules and the hypothesis is that as I explained in the cartoon when T-cells T-cells probably recognize other surface antigens on the tumor and then can act at distant sites away from the tumor causing tumor, lysis or regression there was a point that was raised I believe it was in Dr. Geary's lecture I'm trying to remember and I'm looking at my notes here on sterilizing immunity versus I think it was what some of the HIV community says that perhaps it's not going to be possible to sterilize against HIV as opposed to the so-called so that you know what I mean by sterilizing when we were immunized against measles we now have an immune response that's going to prevent the measles virus from establishing itself in the body and with the sterilizing immunity then is it possible to develop sterilizing immunity to HIV or at least if it is contracted to keep the virus in check perhaps between Dr. Gallo and Dr. Nagle in terms of HIV we don't know yet obviously I think the goal of any ideal vaccine would be to provide sterilizing immunity and if you can't you have to ask yourself what is the trade off but in some ways I think by lowering the viral load and making people less likely to transmit to others that's good but if on the other hand you convert the virus to a latent form so that it's not detectable but then it can still be passed along to others it could actually conceivably make the situation worse so I think that in the case of Ebola we're fortunate that at least in the models we've looked at so far the immunity seems to be of the sterilizing sort in HIV I think that we just don't know this is for Dr. Elizabeth Nagle how do you prevent gene rejection gene rejection since a foreign gene is inserted is there going to be a problem with that? that's a good question I think what we've learned to date and from both some of the early cancer trials and also some of the early cardiovascular trials is that when you put foreign DNA into the body the rejection or an autoimmune response against the foreign gene is actually reasonably minimal there's a counterpart to that we also, using our current vectors we're really not able to achieve expression of the gene over a very long period of time some of that may be due to degradation of the gene and vector by natural enzymes some of it may also be some degree of rejection of the foreign gene itself now in some cases if you're introducing the human gene for a particular protein and you already have that human gene in your body you're probably less likely to reject it than if it's a completely new or absolutely foreign gene that your body hasn't seen before and it's the latter that's the concept that we used in the cancer cases here you have any comments? I think that immune rejection is something that we have to reckon with in gene therapy particularly it poses a serious problem for correcting inherited diseases where the gene may be missing we're trying to replace it and it would be regarded as being foreign and so I think in their number of strategies to pursue we talked about it a little bit in the firing line lesson alternative vectors, transient immunosuppression incorporating features into the virus that would do that for us it's important to recognize that in the meantime there are many applications where we don't have to worry about that the anti-cancer applications we want to induce immunity and in fact with what Betsy presented on the transfer of foreign MHC it really is the response we engender that creates the therapy so the immune system is a double-edged sword and we need to use it to our advantage when we can and we will need to get more sophisticated as we go down the road perhaps some of the audience wasn't most of the audience did not have a chance at the firing line last night because here's a question about using alternative vectors as opposed to virus you just made a brief allusion to that so wouldn't mind expanding if somebody was asking about that well that's a very important area for future development in many ways the analogy that I've made to others in the past is that for gene delivery vectors that in viruses and modified viruses were essentially taming what nature gave to us in the virus whereas with synthetic vectors we're building from scratch components that we think will facilitate gene delivery in many ways the analogy I like to make is it's like taming a horse versus building a car and there are times no matter how well you tame the horse that it may get out of control and so I think that having the ability to assemble the parts is good but it's technically very challenging and I think it's going to come as a second wave it's already coming as a second wave and I suspect we'll get increasingly more sophisticated as we go along with the virus too isn't there a problem with the immune response to the virus because I think that was a problem using adeno and delivery of the cystic fibrosis treating gene yeah and it's likely to be less a problem with synthetic vectors although we are realizing now that even naked DNA itself can act as an adjuvant to the immune system that it actually can stimulate immune responses so the immune system will remain a challenge for both although I am hopeful synthetic vectors will offer improvements Now switching to Ted Peters the other end what are your thoughts on what Stephen J. Gould writes in his book Full House that evolution doesn't necessarily mean progress Well as I suggested I think in my talk I just assumed that evolution does not necessarily mean progress and of course that fits the theory that if it's random and if it's unsupervised it does not necessarily mean progress so is there another question hidden behind that one? No perhaps we're asking some elaboration Excuse me while I read this Well I'll ask the question and finish reading this excuse me In delivering genes someone in the audience wants to know rather than delivering the gene what would be the effects of delivering the growth factors directly the protein directly in the synth? Excellent question and that is actually being done there are a number of trials going on where the protein for the growth factor is being delivered instead of the gene there are pluses and minuses to that again it's going to require delivery of the protein to exactly the site where you want to induce the new blood vessel formation again requiring some delivery catheters or devices the potential disadvantage is that that protein has sort of a one-time hit or miss effect it has its action gets degraded and gets excreted the potential advantage of genetic forms of therapies if you introduce the gene and as I had mentioned earlier get sort of continuous production of the protein that's the goal although with our current vectors as others have said we get somewhat limited expression of the gene but often for some of the diseases that we want to treat expression over several weeks or a month may be sufficient and I suspect that probably in about two years from now there are going to need to be head-to-head comparisons of giving for example VEGF by a recombinant protein approach or giving it by a gene approach for a particular disease indication Okay, Dr. Holland along those lines I'd like to ask Gary does any bullet like a protein target exclusively to vascular endothelium or will it hit some epithelial sheets? Yeah, the characterization that we've done so far suggests that it has a preference for endothelium but it's not exclusively endothelial cells what seems to be remarkable is that cells of the hematopoietic lineage, blood cells, T cells, B cells are not at all infected in contrast to the usual envelope of ampetropic retroviruses which infects those cells quite well so it's a distinct pattern of infection and it's one that I think we can utilize I think the other important aspect of being able now to pseudotype with the Ebola glycoprotein is that it should allow us now to define the receptors and several labs actually are very actively working on that An ethical question that derives from the navel's work and leads also to some ethical questions in treatment of disease using animal models the writer of I Want to Hold Your Hand lost his wife recently and she was a great promoter of animal rights and after her death, Paul McCartney has asked that people give money for cancer research but also give money for keeping animals out of research is that a Promethean, that's sort of a Promethean question also and using animals for solving human problems you should let Ted take the first crack well it's an ethical decision algorithm right you have to decide in advance whether you're going to use animals for research or not and then once you have then what follows critics, those who are in favor of animal rights over against their use in experimentation will accuse us of being anthropocentric that somehow or other we're going to treat animals as things as a means for some kind of human end and I think that's simply the case and we'll have to either bite the bullet on that one or not but that would apply also to vegetarianism versus meat eating it would seem to me across the board I wonder for those who do animal research is there a difference between a mere inanimate thing and an animal in research, is there a level of respect that sentient beings get even if they're being sacrificed for this much larger purpose of human betterment would that satisfy the sensitive among us or not and I just don't know the answer to that particular question let me once again ask this question again of you several years I was a member of the recombinant DNA advisory committee at NIH which controlled all the transgenic and so on experiments and for one of these meetings the president of the animal rights society came and one of the things that was done there was to create transgenic animals in other words and put human genes into animals particularly human genes into mice and he objected the way he phrased it very well I think he said human gene into a mouse offends against a mouse's mouse nose how would you what would you say to that? that's kind of the flip side of what I would call the religious yuck factor that we find quite frequently in those people who cry playing God who want to say we don't want transgenic animals on the grounds that the species ought not to be mixed in one fashion or another and that there's something the assumption is there's something pure about the human species that ought not to be mixed up with the animal so that's just kind of the flip side of that there are a couple of variants on that in scientific creationism you get this doctrine that God had created the species in a fixed form at the beginning and they never changed that very plank I've never understood that I don't understand where it comes from but people do seriously believe that for a biotech company that I had some contact with Systemics which is an AIDS research company they know very well that pigs are the best experimental animals to be used but the majority of the people on the board are Jewish are respected not to use pigs for their experiments but to go to mice for theological reasons and that kind of decision needs to be respected but that's dealing with a very specific animal and not with animals in general finally getting back to the mouse-ness of the mouth which sounds so platonic it's wonderful to see Plato alive very well today when we just take note that the chemical make-up of DNA is the same for a human being as it is for the mouse and for the rabbit you saw in my picture and for the poor squirrel that got caught in the transformer today it's all the same DNA and so sharp lines between what is a human being and what is another sentient being those sharp lines are just not there when we think genetically so anyway I would just say that I'm not that worried about the mouse-ness of the mouse-ness of the human-ness of a human when it comes to genetic criteria well in that particular experiment mice are somewhat lovable creatures I'm sure cat owners would object to the use of cats but what about say take it into cockroaches could one use cockroaches for example for you share the DNA with them don't we I think the issue that we run into is that when we're trying these highly experimental therapies and these are being tested in people for the very first time we need to do some sort of testing that makes sure that these approaches are safe and I think every scientist and at least that I know respects the animals that they work with they treat them humanely there certainly are guidelines for the care and use of animals but I don't see that it would be possible to advance these new treatments were it not for appropriate animal testing even further every lot polio vaccine every lot of yellow fever vaccine every lot of measles vaccine is tested in the highest of the non-human animals that we work with monkeys and I the only alternative is to test it in children someone another question from the audience if the quote answer comes ultimately from the quote outside for in other words God's purpose plan then does it logically follow that the human race is a no serious threat of extinction no that doesn't follow at all did you want a longer answer well don't take the appendix out well it's been an interesting afternoon some unexpected and some very new insights into both the theology and the ethics of viruses as well as the use of gene machines for delivery of therapeutic genes well now recess those who have tickets for the banquet we the doors will open at six o'clock it's in the second floor of the student union called alumni hall the dinner will be served at six thirty for those of you who do not have tickets for the dinner we all will be coming back here oh seven thirty quarter of eight for Dr. C. J. Peters lecture so you are invited to return here for the evening lecture thank you for being here this afternoon