 bit after the time so I think people are still arriving and taking their seats but we have a lot to cover today so I'm going to go ahead and gavel us to order. Welcome everyone to the first panel discussion of the 2020 fall semester of the Science Circle. I'm really pleased to have with us today several of our favorite panelists. We have Robert Hendricks tagline, we have Stephen Geyser, Stephen Zudify and Phil Youngblood, Vic, who we all know and love. Today's topic is going to be ethics dimensions in scientific research which I confess initially might seem a little bit dry but I think we're going to have a lot of interesting discussion on this because we have some really interesting aspects from which to look at ethical considerations. Robert is going to talk to us about using animals in scientific research and he has a really nice presentation prepared for us about that and then Stephen will talk to us about the ethics of gene editing which I think will also be of great interest to all of us. Gene editing is going to have a huge impact on the future and then finally Phil is going to sort of lead a discussion to kind of speculate about the ethics of colonizing other planets and I think that it's a little bit speculative but has I think acquired a new urgency with the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus which is highly suggestive of the possibility of some kind of microbial life in the upper atmosphere of Venus because phosphine is basically a product of biological processes. It's very hard to make inorganically and in fact the surface of Mars does not really have the proper conditions to make phosphine as far as we know so this is a really tantalizing new result that was announced about so I think that will be a fun discussion too. Before we get started let me remind everyone that the Science Circle is a grant funded non-profit dedicated to the mission of developing virtual world platforms for education so I just caution you to be on your best behavior try not to grieve or troll us too badly please and so I think with those brief announcements let's go ahead and and get into it hopefully we can and if we have time at the end we may be able to address some additional concerns you know things like sort of junk science shady journals other sorts of aspects of scientific ethics like that that we might be able to touch on maybe at the end if we have time open all right with that Robert would you please take the mic and and give us your presentation yes thank you can you hear me okay good I wanted to start with the definition animal ethics it's a branch of ethics which examines human animal relationships the moral consideration of animals and how non-human animals ought to be treated I want to put up front here about you know it this has a broad spectrum of interpretation and it changes over time generally going to more civilized compared to the 18th and 19th centuries particularly but some ask if it's okay to have pets you know it's people say I own the pet and that sort of thing are these questions about that and just to put that question to rest at the out front here I think that falls under the category of loving who you want having the freedom and liberty to love who you want to love and love a pet and they love you back and they have a happy safe life that's wonderful so the age of enlightenment is a big determinant on in what many in the western world have known in the lifetime during the 20th century and 21st century basically was the birth of classical liberalism I think John Locke was a proponent of classical liberalism and what that means is that individuals had civil rights they had inherent rights by which they lived under rule of law and had liberty and it wasn't legal to get their door kicked in in the middle of the night and be assaulted by government agents who decided that they wanted to take them out for one reason or another like in my old hometown of Louisville Kentucky with Breonna Taylor but that's the there's little difference in that from the knock at the door at three in the morning which didn't even happen I don't think it was just the door was kicked in but anyway utilitarianism was an outgrowth of this I'm going to just make a quick statement to John Stuart Mill an incredibly brilliant individual and outstanding on a lot of frontiers for one thing he was a big proponent of women's rights and that was in the mid 19th century the Victorian era that was quite controversial and one of the well the utilitarianism in a word it means party hearty and don't hurt anybody try to be happy and help everybody to be happy as possible and avoid doing negative stuff one of the shortcomings of the philosophy is that it underrates how many people maybe want to walk over other people to be happy or like I met Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once and he was a historian and in the JFK John F. Kennedy cabinet and he said there's in the United States has always been a group of people throughout the history of the United States which wanted to put everybody in their place and they seem to be reborn every generation so at any rate there are people who want to be happy by having their foot on your neck but it's a philosophy that assumes a reasonable rational thinking on the part of others that's similar to the philosopher and a quality of goodwill I have a quote here from Delana Delanda the Finn that she sent me describing information about this this is going to be available in and a pdr that or pdf I mean pdr is a physician's desk reference which is mostly electronic anymore yeah we we will talk about that a bit Vic but at any rate I'll let you read this on your own but basically Jeremy Bantham who's a skeleton and with his wax head is displayed here in his own clothing English philosopher that eccentric and and like Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill was influential in economics was also a proponent of and a founder the utilitarianism a branch of philosophy basically it's how to be happy and how not to make other everybody else unhappy that being said when civil rights of regular citizens who like men who who served in this military you know not women and not the classes that were kept from power but of male citizens and they couldn't even be safe until this classic liberalism took hold and french revolution was something of an out of a spin-off event and other issues came up like slavery animal abuse child abuse one interesting point was in the mid 19th well late 19th century the first documented case of reported child abuse in the United States was noted and it was this little girl whose mother was her husband had died and she was totally out of luck and her child was taken for by a charitable organization who later gave the child over to people claiming to be the parents who were frauds and when the mother returned for her she was said that told the child was dead at any rate this child spent about seven years living one place another with this family that were treated her worse than a dog was treated back in the 19th century and I can tell you some stories but I won't from my own experiences but at any rate somebody noted and was concerned and to put an end to it they had to bring evidence to this attorney by the name of Henry Berg who was well to do and had a fascinating history and I put the link to this blog of New York Archives of New York History Archives he was the founder of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and he took on this case this little girl got help from the Humane Society or the you know the ASPCA and she was rescued and actually lived into the 50s 1950s and she had scars on her face and her legs and all over her body from being physically abused but I just thought that was really kind of fascinating that that's what it took he he would go head to head against people like P.T. Barnum that was before people like P.T. Barnum could get elected president and he was concerned about the abuse of the animals used in the circus and everything else I'm going to jump ahead 1948 was in response to the Holocaust the Holocaust they got a big revulsion and a swing of the pendulum and Eleanor Roosevelt was a great champion for human rights and this is from a speech she gave at the Sorbonne on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the United Nations she was on a little committee a couple of old men who thought they would just sideline her and put up with her and she won them over and basically direction of it she was an extraordinary visionary person of great heart and the human rights interest in concern about human rights and that is a work of the mission of the UN which authoritarians absolutely hate came out of her efforts which were a response to what was discovered in the atrocities from World War II now the first law and on earth to regulate animal experimentation was in Great Britain 1876 Britain has often at least from an American point of view often been a great moral leader and I say that to Irish friends and sometimes they bristle and Scottish too I'm a good mish so at any rate I can say these things but they they have had more influence by philosophical rational thinking than sooner than many people it took the 90 the United States until the 1960s to respond to concerns about animal abuse not just beating dogs but taking piglets and castrating them without anesthesia so they'll put on weight their anesthesia was someone holding their legs things like this farming practices were utterly cruel I'm not saying every farmer didn't have a heart but animals were played down as not having any any sense not really knowing what was going on not remembering anything and I think all these sorts of things have been dismissed there were two landmark articles sports illustrated in 65 and life magazine in 1966 so it created some political pressure to give the US Congress some mojo deal with it this was from the life magazine article it was entitled and that was in 1966 it was entitled concentration camps for dogs I'm going to read to you it's a small here but I'm going to read to you the just the top bit the dog's name is lucky he's a lemon-colored English pointer with a fine head and subtle signs of good expensive breeding but when a woman from the animal rescue institute came across lucky at a sulfur Oklahoma fair three weeks ago this is what she saw static emaciated horror towering hopeless and up for auction woman bought him for three dollars plus a dollar for the chain the problem was animals were being stolen pets or livestock as property was a bit more protected especially you think out west rustling cattle that's a major theft but and stealing a person's horse when they're out in the wilderness that's a kin to murder but dogs had little protection here's another picture the life magazine in the 60s was a weekly journal and it had great impact people looked forward to it and it had great distribution and 1965 sports illustrated actually did an article called pepper goes missing and pepper was the stalemation and you can read about it I gave a link to it and this is part of the history of the American welfare act animal welfare act I mean but that's a picture of pepper pepper was stolen from a farm in Pennsylvania handed from a dealer to dealer dealer they were puppy mills and people that would buy and sell animals for abuse and it was all for a quick buck and no records were kept and they tracked it down and discovered that pepper had been used in experimentation in surgeries in a hospital in Brooklyn I think and then killed and cremated and that sort of thing plus this woman whose name you should know Christine Stevens she was a lovely charming person who was like Eleanor Roosevelt able to convince people able to win them over and persistent she devoted her life to protecting creatures all sizes and including laboratory animals she founded the animal welfare institute in New York in 1951 this was from her obituary was I think about 30 years later but she worked on all kinds of things too in terms of infrastructure to have it more compatible with animals being able to survive and protecting birds and she also is considered the mother of the animal welfare act and endangered species act she formed in 1955 a society for animal protection legislation which was the institute the animal welfare institute's lobbying arm and they fought hard for a 1958 Humane slaughter act and in 1966 achieved the laboratory animal welfare act which was signed into law by Lyndon B. Ames Johnson she worked for free she worked for passion she also addressed the elephant tusks and the elephant trade problems that are still ongoing this gentleman representative Joseph Resnick was an inventor he invented antennas that helped in reception for television and the development of television as a major form of as communication and he was a congressman from New York he was a sponsor primary sponsor of the laboratory animal welfare bill he was influenced by Christine Stevens and by the story of pepper and one reason i'm telling you about this is because you don't have to be famous and you don't have to be super rich powerful you don't even have to be in political office have a heart and be dedicated and speak to people find people of good heart and you can make a difference also if you write i used to see in this crass consumerism with their bumper stickers on their cars saying whoever dies with the most the man who dies with the most toys wins and i always felt the individual who dies with the most published the most writing left and writing writing is a huge way to make a difference in the world so ethics of medical research started to emerge in the 60s there were it applied to this is an important paragraph here it was limited this initial act was limited to warm-blooded animals and didn't cover most of those mice rats birds were excluded fish were excluded as well i mentioned them because they're vertebrates other acts came out in 1970 a horse protection act in 1972 marine marine mammals protecting whales porpoises seals and polar bears in the marine mammal protection act of 1972 and it dealt with killings and takings of of these animals for research purposes and insisted if it had to be done it must be done you mainly in this sort of thing 1973 the endangered and threatened species act was passed and this is all in american legislation i'm not that familiar with legislation from other countries but i would point out that those three horses marine mammals and endangered threatened species those laws were signed into law by richard nixon so a tricky dick um um violations of this law are dealt with by the secretary of the agriculture and a few other services that all sounds good it it's generally created to push for oversight on how animals are dealt with and it focuses on their housing so they have habitation that is uh suitable to their needs as opposed to like a narrow pen uh with pigs that can't even turn around they're stuck in one position their entire lives uh and also pain control which was not being regarded by researchers particularly they felt like animals really don't feel and they don't remember it but then physicians uh i don't know if this is still done but uh when i was in medical school the circumcisions were done without anesthesia he said they don't feel anything at this age yeah why don't you do it on yourself and see what it feels like so that was the feeling i got from it well this enforcement i mean you have to have somebody in charge but if you get people who are trolls and agents of corporations and like the um uh admiral who never went to see uh really don't deal with animal husbandry and animal slaughter and the torture that animals go through in agriculture and in laboratories they can be pretty detached and not and and even with that the the fines of thousand dollars i mean it's a slap on the wrist it's it isn't enough but uh there have been amendments and uh there one of the things that it requires an institutional uh animal care in research that they have an institutional committee that includes a veterinarian that is not part of the uh part of the system and i think generally uh people that are not uh in the system they're just regular citizens uh hoping to get somebody of normal uh level of humanity won't just you know accept authority when they're told well this is the way we do it um there's a thing called the three r's i'll just mention quickly replacement reduction refinement and it's basically uh strategies to minimize or reduce what animals go through in research and the level of animal that in terms of if they can go to invertebrates or into to lower animals or they can avoid using primates as much or whatever now when i was at university of pennsylvania there was a marked series of attacks on labs and um yes there was a newer surgeon or a neurophysiologist who was doing experiments with actually with monkeys and he was smashing their heads in without anesthesia or sedation and the argument was that it would change the uh inflammatory process in the brain that would that causes further brain damage um and um a um supporter of pita which really emerged in the 80s and was part of this growing animal rights movement uh blew the whistle on it and uh uh it uh the courts sort of shied away from it the courts are afraid to get into litigation and afraid to get into elements of animal rights and uh there would be no end to it uh i think it's going to have to come from uh legislation um it's a couple more points i'm going to pass out a note card i don't want to dominate the time i've already talked too long uh there are i think vik mentioned speciesism which is assumption of human superiority leading to exploitation of animals a um moral ethics philosophy a philosopher who's named um um peter singer he's an austrian um wrote a book in 1975 called uh animal liberation a new ethics for treatment of animals that's going to be on a note card i'm going to try to pass around and i'll give it to a few people and maybe you can pass it to everybody else uh and uh these are recommended reading one reason why i really relate to his thinking to the holocaust is his parents fled austria they fled vienna after the anschluss um went to austria and uh i think suffering including cultural suffering can they get greater humanity at times sometimes it gets uh more savagery another book that's very important in this is the case for human the case for animal rights 1983 which uh was written by uh a philosopher uh from the uh north carolina state university in raleigh north which is near me uh tom reagan and he was very influential in the animal rights movement the singer is uh cited as kind of a major catalyst in the growth of the um of the animal rights movement so there was more i'd like to say but it's uh too much and i'm going to cut off here except to say that um yes that's going to be on the note card i'm going to have um passed out as you know i heard paul erlich once say that and he asked about what about animals you know for slaughterhouses and he says whether animals born to die and they're doomed and they're there for industrial production for food and our needs you know because you need belts and shoes and that sort of thing i hear someone clearing the throat so uh as the um uh food sources and food practices for people uh change and become more um uh uh vegetarian less dependent on um uh this uh traditional agricultural development or production uh people are going to question all the more the use of like taking pigs who are smart intelligent sentient emotional animals uh and using them making cuts so that you can study wound healing in their skin um and uh which is an experiment i saw somebody doing uh say we're a resident and had a required requirement to produce research uh some of this research is crap and it uh is abusive uh to use animals for it and but it's just somebody not thinking it through and it's a cultural thing so age of enlightenment utilitarianism civil rights for humans humane humanist treatment of people and you have the inevitable question why not animals too what's the difference and there is good research that animals have emotions and have thoughts and have memories and um they like us avoid pain and seek pleasure um so i'll end there thanks so much fantastic robert uh with regard to that last point i will refer people to uh last year's presentation on animal behavior and animal problem solving animal learning um we touch on some of those topics about um how animal emotions for example um so so feel free to check out the science circle website for that um i actually have some specific items about the the animal ethics that i'd like to touch on but um i'm gonna bite my tongue and hold that see if we have some time at the end um in the interest of time let's uh move on to um steven's presentation on gene editing and crisper and the ethical considerations in the use of um of that powerful tool and so steven please take the mic and and uh take it away all right thank you very gone thank you everyone for coming to this panel on ethics again something that i want to try and convince people that we should be thinking a lot more especially when it comes to again population-wide interventions we can do in terms of the germline and people's health and happiness so i have a bit of a little bit of an organization i want to do which is just remind people what crisper does because this is a step level change this technology in the ability to do very precise genome modification i think that that's useful and again i will be limiting my talk to um think about human ethics there's actually a great story when you think about pig castration that we there are ways to avoid pig castration using crisper and there actually is a company that's out there trying to market those pigs now and get them past regulatory hurdles in europe uh but we'll talk about humans i do want to give a brief history of eugenics uh because i think that that is something that i think we really this is an example where history is a very important place to look to inform what we want to do now and i'll talk about uh some of the modern ideas and credo's behind the the regulations and the thoughts about modern genome editing and then finally uh to try and pose some questions get people to ask think about what they think so um the first just quick reminder and i have some slides up here if you look up a little bit above us of the idea that bacteria have these very primitive in a sense immune systems but they're very effective at trying to destroy invading dna or rna so again bacteria die by the gazillion trillions from viruses and so they need to have defenses not only that can help attack and defend against the virus but then to remember that they've been attacked by a particular virus before so that way they have a thing called immunological memory it's kind of like what we have with vaccines although we do it from a very different cellular level so this idea of a immunological memory is really important and that's something that developed over evolution but the key part of this immune system is the ability to detect a particular sequence and then cut that dna or rna and if you're cutting it then the virus can't do viral things and that's a really key part to how um how these work so we have through the efforts of again i would say at this point probably thousands of scientists if maybe not even tens of thousands of scientists have found ways to harness this for human genome editing in addition to animals mosquitoes insects bacteria yeast all these other things and so i don't want to get too caught up in the technical parts of it the main thing i want to point out here is that i've i've done the science i've seen the scientists that are doing this and i've seen the progress that's being made and i know the specific technical hurdles but within the next 10 years i just want to posit this in the next 10 years we can probably safely effectively high efficiency make the vast majority genomic changes we want to make that have some purpose in humans and so that is i think where we want to have this discussion in terms of ethics that we really aren't thinking about technical limitations because that's been a lot of the topic right now as people say oh we shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that um and that's true i don't want to get away from that conversation right now but i think in the next 10 years we need to be having a conversation now about the idea that we can do almost anything we want in terms of genetic so the bottom part of this slide is just a quick reminder that there are two types of tissues in human bodies there's the germ line and then there's somatic tissues and the main thing is if you think about your own body all the tissues that you think about with one exception are somatic and that is they are differentiated they cannot make more humans or they're not uh capable of being you know a haploid egg or sperm that can make a new human and that a lot of times you can do interventions that are therapeutic that are some tissues not others or even at a very young age you can make something somatic so it affects the majority tissues but that doesn't get propagated the next generation and so the other part germ line and that's what's shown up here on the right in this panel is that if we find a way to edit either before fertilization or very early in the embryo then all the cells can have that genetic change and then it can be passed on to the next generation so i think that is that is a distinction that we want to talk about and and of course uh scissor g mentions the movie gattica and i think that's um a little bit what we want to talk about i think maybe we're not quite to that science fiction part idea yet so i wanted to frame the conversation this way but i think a lot of i'm actually going to come back to the ethics of the distinction of somatic versus germ line but one thing that i think we're already doing as a society is trying to use crisper for therapeutics and this is something that is primarily on somatic tissues we're doing it for say cancer therapies uh immunological t-cell therapy we're trying to fix uh i think people are targeting deafness we're also talking about sickle cell anemia or beta thalassemias these are things that we can do systematically and i really don't think that many people think of that as a as a hard ethics issue because it's just like another therapeutic so we'll get deeper into the other parts and just so let's talk about eugenics and the term comes from like kind of means born well that is like a good body is the birth is the organism that's being born and uh it's basically started with with gullton and historically the idea was selective breeding again this is something that came from the late 19th century um although i'd say modern day we're now at this point we're i don't know genome editing is a new type of eugenics and eugenics i think anybody who hears the term mealyth has it in a bad frame of mind and i'm not going to dispute that because given the context at the time eugenics was basically a pretty horribly discriminatory concept and just to point out specifically how institutionalized this was this was a big institution that there were international congresses on eugenics that featured scientists politicians very influential important people uh but again the origins came from sir gullton and believe that you can selectively breed to um have a better human race now of course if you anybody want to hazard a guess as to what the best human race was in gullton's idea in gullton's mind yeah white british men essentially and so again this comes back to the idea that um you know the context of time that whatever frame of reference you want for what is the best thing honestly seems to come back around to the idea of if you're the one who has the idea or holds the power then somehow you are you are the best one now um yeah we'll get to that in just a second bear it on uh now interestingly the united states kind of took it a different way when this concept got to united states they actually wanted to actively get rid of undesirable traits and that's in quotes uh because again we're talking about from a perspective of who's in power and what they consider to be undesirable and this is another quick point I want to make is that no matter how bad and you feel about the united states and its politics and its government and any number or the people or any number of things going on you don't know the history of the early 2000s because the united states was incredibly racist incredibly isolationist and these are the types of things that people thought were undesirable were um people with mental retardation or in addition to the racism the mental retardation um the homosexuality those types of things and uh and mike shaw says it still is and I'll I'll I'll agree with that but I think the the extent and degree to which we're talking and the institutionalization of some of these things is is quite a bit of a step change between uh one example of this is in 1911 there was an establishment of the eugenics records office and I mentioned this because the goal was they were actually trying to document and track what was or was not undesirable and oddly enough they came up with the conclusion that people who were poor and low income and in low social standing were also the undesirables which you know fancy that anyway again I don't want to get too much of a conversation about the politics but I do want to remind people that this was a different frame of mind and that there was much more officialness to what eugenics was and and this really goes into the concept that eugenics was a bad concept uh again if you extend a little bit of our time so barrigan mentioned a us supreme court case uh I have a link here uh in my slide presentation and if you remind I'll try and remember to put in a local chat just a second a wonderful npr interview on fresh air with um Andy Cohen who wrote a book called imbeciles and this was in 2016 this is a 47 minutes period of your time that you would love um but what he highlights in the book is a 1927 us supreme court case that upheld the right by eight to one an eight to one vote that they can forcibly sterilize people and what's interesting about the specific case in terms of Kerry buck was that she in fact there were no genetic indicators she wasn't she didn't suffer from any sort of genetic retardation or um any diseases she was actually sexually assaulted and now because she was a morally unpure person they wanted to put her in a colony and then forcibly sterilize her and by the way she was black so this is the type of context that we have and it's a I need to read those books as I sign circle on this fresh air always give me a reading list I can't handle but um and of course you know Hitler of course took it to another level in terms of thinking about eugenics and I don't want to talk too much about that either I think some of the best writing on that comes from Stephen j gould and you can always go back and find the original nuremberg laws that said jews are you know we're going to pass laws say basically not people um and then the want to see protocol which again uh was what steven j gould was writing about this is actually where the nazi officer sat down and actually discussed the dynamics and some of the context of quote unquote the final solution with the actual eradication so you know in context I think the main point I want to make about um this is that there was extremely wrong pointing moral compass uh at the time for when we think about trying to do stuff on a eugenics type of level and I think that this is something where we need to keep this in mind and oh yeah so and sumo does a nice kind of point that the nazis learned from the eugenicists of the united states you know it's not like they came up with this by themselves they saw this modeled by us uh to to come up with some of this so let's just fast forward now to the modern day context where again I think you know we have a very different um again like uh talking about us john stewart mill I'm talking about unit utilitarianism and other moral frameworks in terms of how we think society should be our wealth and other riches should be distributed among populations uh from a theoretical point of view either the other way obviously the practice of this is very different and so right now I'd say the guiding principles and this is codified early on when CRISPR was developed by national academy of sciences and I have this in the live presentation is you know genome editing is powerful and so but what's the purpose of this and when we want to do therapy or intervene with it and promoting well-being transparency do care responsible science respect for persons fairness and transnational cooperation these are some guiding principles behind genome editing I think if you it's hard to think of a farther contrast from early eugenics than that those types of principles and of course this doesn't mean that people perfectly have executed this when we think about the chinese scientists he who basically genome edited to young well as zygo so now young girls to be hopefully resistant to getting infection by hiv now I don't want to say some things in his defense that this is the type of idea where genome editing is helpful if we could edit basically the entire human population we could make us resistant to hiv entirely for the entire future of humanity until somehow it mutates or does uh now there are downsides any therapy and there are some things that are maybe downsides to that gene be edited but this type of idea makes sense now what he was most criticized for point number two here which is um transparency although I think also fairly in terms of the responsible science the the type of editing and the type of results he could get I think you can also you know fairly criticize how he went about it and the expected efficiency but what's most recent and this is actually just this is a pre-print I'm showing this is that basically a human consortium of genome editors but then also now a publication by the national academy of sciences has this new book called heritable heritable genome heritable human human genome editing and I think this is this guiding light where again some of the key points are to be responsible with science to try and help people and right now what they really want to say is let's limit the only type of germline editing to diseases where we have a very clear case that are very detrimental to a person that have a high inheritance and so I think this is something where um really it's limiting but I think it also maybe is that very good first step that if we can come to a common ground agreement on the types of things we want to target and change that's a good place again again this is an example of community trying to decide although it's obviously scientists guiding the principle and so this is kind of the point I want to pose now these are some of these big questions that I have also a little bit in my mind because I think I differ a little bit from some people that you can maybe think of different tiers of genome editing uh there's somatic manipulation things that are very related to therapy things that you can put in somatic tissues like would it not be nice if we all could just have a an injection that made most of our cells resistant to getting COVID-19 right now right um vaccines I think are still very effective for this but you know that's the same type of idea there's other types of somatic manipulation though and these are the things that you might see from movies like uh oh now oh yeah so gattica kind of as an example I'm blanking on the name of the other one I'm trying to think of uh the Von Dam movie with theogenic enhancement we can actually make people we have genes we have insights into things that make people smarter stronger anti-aging maybe things that take think of a baseline human state and then our universal soldier barrigan thank you yes that is perfect I totally would blank on that one one of my favorite science fiction but this um these are manipulations that of course don't carry on but can still provide either benefits to society or again I think the the second tier is different because it's really providing benefits to an individual and I'm just not sure that you know those are different tiers because I would say who really benefits from those types of things now the other one of course now we're talking about germline manipulation where again we can think about the he manipulated zygotes that are trying to preemptively be resistant to HIV or corrections genetic diseases tasex disease adethalsemia sickle cell anemia those are all things where then once the one person is done they can think about their next generation as driving benefit from that as well and so um but then also we think and the scary part that have a lot of people and I think the germline consort the consortium wanted to be cautious about is the idea of why do we do we want to just enhance people to make them say smarter better faster better stronger like six million dollar man but from a genetic point of view and so I think um you know that's another tier now I do want to make a case though and this is something that I think is important to keep in mind is that if if we come to a point where you can have widespread and routine somatic functionally that's different than germline right something where you just as an early child you get a shot then really what is the source of the dynamics of the of the minute of who owns the technology and that is if every generation has to go get a shot is that not conveying more power to corporations that provide the service as compared to just doing germline editing that then benefits people from then on it doesn't have a recurring cost from generation to generation and so I do think that that is a point of view that I like to be very cautious about germline editing but I do want to say that if we strongly go the route of only of not doing germline editing then we're basically creating a power dynamic where somatic genome editing is always done by every generation and there's a cost to that unless you can make a model where the cost is free that again you can imagine certain types of government structures more like starfleets or the federation than what we have now where it's just something this is something where everybody would benefit at no cost so I'd like to explore this a little bit deeper I'm especially interested in this the ethics of a human enhancement with gene editing I'm my assumption is that in 200 years gene editing technology is going to be so cheap and easy that it's going to be universal it's not going to be available only to the rich it's going to be available universal just like vitamins or something and that that is going to make enhancing your children simply too seductive to resist and everyone's going to do it and I think that if in fact that becomes the norm that when you get pregnant you know you know inject yourself or whatever whatever the delivery mechanism might be with a suite of gene editing machines that will enhance your children so that they're taller and healthier and smarter and all those kinds of things better looking and stuff like that that that is going to shift the ethical calculus so that in fact it might be considered unethical to not edit your children to not enhance your children so so in other words once something becomes so universally so accepted if you're if you're bucking the trend then you know you're the one who becomes suspect anybody I mean am I am I just feel like if you're if you extrapolate this out hundreds of years where it gets a little bit unpredictable to know what will happen and I just it just feels inevitable to me that that germline enhancement of our species is just inevitable given given enough time so I'd sort of like to see what you all think about that I'll mention one quick thing but I'll agree with you I think you know any like any technology when we think about cars or we think about surgery it starts out relatively crude and then becomes universally like defibrillators right I mean anybody can have a heart attack now and get please treated by somebody just right there safely you know I don't think that the idea one of the main problems with something mean widespread but also that costs money is it extends rich poor gaps it extends the privileged maintaining their privilege maintains power structures maintain the power structure so I think that is an important thing to try and address early but it's also hard to argue against everybody being say fitter stronger happier I mean I mean look at here in second life you know very few people choose ugly avatars for example and in a sense our avatars are maybe the dream of how we would like all people to be and we all we're all young we're all 25 forever and so forth so some of the commentary in the local chat is that Susan G says CRISPR is already quote unquote University available and Max Chattanoor says practically nothing is universal and that just prompts me to think that you know nowadays you know healthcare especially United States extremely expensive getting surgery is super expensive just getting like a CAT scan can cost $500 you know depending on your insurance plan just sort of sort of routine diagnostic tests like that are very expensive drugs are expensive everything is expensive CRISPR on the other hand is just infinitesimally just an infinitesimal amount of the cost of these kinds of standard healthcare costs we have now I mean compared to surgery if you could just fix something with gene editing for $100 or something or I mean who knows what so and so you know I just feel the chemicals necessary for CRISPR and in a couple 100 years the gene editing engines will be extremely well refined and accurate and so forth reproducible so that it'll just transform that the landscape of healthcare and really and that will be a driving engine to make it universal but the fact that it will be so cheap will really create a demand for it if people can escape the high cost of normal healthcare yeah and I think you know once we start thinking about things being universal with CRISPR maybe things are cheaper right so even you know people can't get germline editing where then subsequent generations don't need to pay more money every year or every person you know that's what's benefit everybody I don't want I want to conclude on one point since I want to give Vic his yes I'm going over time that's yeah I was wondering if I should cough yeah so that's that's my bad I'll go ahead and finish your thought there Steven and we'll move on quickly to a film well what would really be nice to have and this you see this was international consortiums of scientists and policymakers would just be a buy-in to what we as humans and as governments believe are the right moral compasses and this doesn't have to do just with genome editing but it has to do with distributions of money distributions of wealth agriculture food even things like iPhones things that are luxury items that make people happy and our entertainment I think that it's really I I do urge of I'm a scientist and I want to move science and technology forward and look for those benefits but I think it is worthwhile to be cautious about this technology when we have I think in the internationally such a bizarrely contentious moral compass about simple things like food and so the germline being I would even argue more precious in the long term than what our food distribution is right now that these are really important things that we need to come to some degree of consensus before we we dive in too far so I'm going to leave it at that and thanks everyone for listening thanks for the participation in the chat and again I'm always free to follow up with people thanks very much Stephen I appreciate that I appreciate you being concise about it too I apologize for extending the discussion to eat up our time here and getting into into Phil's time but let's move on to our next topic which I think maybe we can have a little bit more of a free form discussion but Phil why don't you just make some introductory remarks about the whole well whatever you want to talk about the the colonizing alien planets or any other sort of scientific ethical issues that are on your mind yeah I'm not a swing wide when it comes to ethics the first thing I want to say is from an ethics standpoint is we try to keep these presentations to an hour if you need if all you have is an hour today and you need to leave remember that they're being recorded and you can find them on the science circle website when we were planning this I was asked to talk about future ethics essentially how we might act towards life if we discover it outside the earth and since the future is speculative I'll try to put some things in perspective because their views change over the years if we were having this conversation 100 years ago it'd be very different so we don't just wake up one day and say gee I think I'll be ethical what we once thought was perfectly acceptable we might look in horror today and so even as recently as the last century remember that anthropologists would describe by the people in terms of their own culture it's kind of the well these primitive people are quite but they're obviously not British you know that kind of mentality for those that don't do formal research remember that ethics the whole idea is to protect the subjects and the data and the people excuse me the subjects may be people they may be animals plants bacteria and one of the reasons I'm concerned about how we might approach life outside the earth is we tend to be concerned with and you can hear from the discussion today we tend to be concerned with living things that we view as closest to us so you know we're concerned with the primates and the dolphins etc and but living things outside the earth may be very different in fact actually the first ones we might find are bacteria well will we care whether we run over the bacteria on Mars or not which we may have already done or at least in in some parts you'll recall that in early exploration and even at the beginnings of religion and such that there were religious ideas about humans role to dominate the earth at least that's one translation of it we also thought that as we explored and found people in other parts of the world we thought it was our responsibility for example to civilize the heathens in the united states in the 1800s there was also what was called manifest destiny which was the imperialist cultural belief that we were destined to expand and essentially run over whoever was there it's been alluded to here now you know if you think about it today if we look at history unless you've actually read the original text on it is that a lot of what we think about perhaps aliens or alien life or whatever comes from movies right okay so think back uh say the day the earth stood still in 1951 uh everybody was pointing guns at the spaceship i mean even before they didn't do anything all they did was land everybody's pointing guns and tanks at the spaceship and the first time this big robot moved they shot the the uh alien you know so it's it's a fear thing and later yeah i know i was too and so later though if you were a fan of star trek they had a prime directive where essentially somebody like uh the alien in the day the earth stood still wouldn't be able to just come down to earth and go okay if you guys don't shape up we're going to annihilate all of earth uh basically they said okay yeah exactly uh they basically in star trek they basically said okay may let's see if they're otherwise let's just leave them alone for however many centuries it takes until uh they come to a point where they're not annihilating each other which you know as far as i'm concerned that might be one of the reasons we haven't seen intelligent life so far because well obviously not anywhere near close to that um then you had later on movies like for example in 1968 2001 a space odyssey um well you might know that there were books that followed 2001 a space odyssey and one was made into a movie that was about 2010 and essentially it there was a squabble between us and russians and stuff when they went out to jupiter and if you remember at the very end it basically said there was this godlike voice that or in text really that said all these worlds are yours except for europa you know uh temp no landing there use them together use them in peace um so we're still kind of getting the the uh all these worlds are yours type of mentality meaning that what does that mean in other words if you actually look back in religion are we supposed to be dominant over the earth are we supposed to be caretakers of the earth uh that's another way to translate that um and then of course you get into the nineties when things are getting kind of weird anyway and you've got independence day and mars attacks real funny and then you've got contact and the movie contact in 1997 was essentially at the very end well let's not tell them that we actually discover life because maybe they can't handle it that sort of thing and then of course the movie avatar 2009 where you've got the um noble uh savages and of course what was the point of that where you go yeah kill it kill it tomatoes um you've got the people coming into that world and then mining the world and disrupting the lives of the people there in the movie avatar so there's lots of different ways that we've looked at uh aliens and how we're going to be treating um other worlds so let's take a look then that it's exploration itself uh one is that if you're if you'll think about it we've been using space as a dumping ground ever since the very beginning uh one person said well that's the cost of business well it maybe is in other words if we can't expend the rockets and stuff up there then it might be cost prohibitive to do stuff but there's a lot of um junk up in space that we've already left up there and on the moon max might get more into this but essentially there's little tardigrades I think we we left the astronauts poop and other stuff up there and in addition to kind of littering that's the landing site it looks like a big garbage dump and then there's the ethics of with the Voyager spacecraft that with the map a lot of people said oh my goodness you're telling the aliens where we are because if you remember the little map that came with it it showed what we look like it showed exactly where our planet was and uh then there were the there was the um um record that had all the voices and and luckily the message was uh if you come near you know the message was not if you come here we're going to kill you the message was more or less hi welcome but it was all in different languages uh on earth and such like that so we've we've been wrestling with this idea of who people outside of earth are going to be like and I I just said people but obviously like I said they're not going to be anything like people is more like it so now we're talking about remember that when we went to the moon when the astronauts returned we put them in isolation until we knew that there might not be something there of course we haven't done the same with mars for example is that someone was mentioning that uh there could very well the spacecraft themselves we know how hardy life is good the spacecraft that we've sent to mars could have life on it even after a long voyage in space and it could have easily contaminated the area around those spacecraft already uh fortunately we haven't landed in any place where we know there's life but um it may be too late in some cases right now uh I'm hoping that the spacecraft that when are they launching at the end of the year uh this year that goes there that's trying to look for life I'm hoping that they have done some really careful sterilization of it otherwise we could end up looking for life there and saying oh yeah hey it looks just like earth well no kidding it just came from the mars rover that's going to go look for life yeah yeah okay but what if it isn't what if it doesn't have DNA what if it in other words what if all we discover is bacteria are we going to go ahead well well yeah uh I just wanted to mention uh there is a great moment in the movie contact where ellie says something to the effect that well you know for all we know we're nothing more than a you know an anthill in the middle of nowhere compared to these aliens and then her heart says right and how guilty would you feel if you exterminated an anthill in the middle of nowhere exactly it's the ultimate um golden rule about doing under there's what you there is also the uh star trek uh next generation episode where they tariff they're terraforming a planet which they believe to be sterile but uh due to some mysterious deaths on the on the terraforming crew they discovered that there is a crystalline sort of uh sort of a crystal entity sort of saline solution um life form uh just kind of underneath the sand of the planet that they didn't recognize and you know it's got the famous ugly ugly bags of water uh line from when they finally get to communicate with them so it's very difficult to know whether an alien planet uh you know truly is sterile yes we we know that life finds a way yes okay uh maybe maybe venus is another example of that so well yes and i was going to get to that because there's a couple things that kind of along me recently one is the idea of the space force you know at one point we decided well let's not do that same stupid uh warring with each other out in space but now of course you know once the cat's out of the bag um there's that uh so militarization of space maybe just around the corner unless we decide not to and then the other thing about fosting in the atmosphere of venus if uh no one's caught that what the idea was was they found a chemical which is hard to explain if there isn't some sort of perhaps organic something going on uh there in the atmosphere not on the surface of venus but just in the atmosphere of course it's still very hostile because you're still talking about mostly sulfuric acid and such but we know that life exists on earth in very hostile conditions as well including the few rolls and the sea and that and uh mud pots and you know that sort of thing but then the russians come out and they go well venus is really a russian planet and so it goes along with the space force that you start getting this kind of um mentality about whose planet is it you know it's like Antarctica at least we've divided that one up but you know is the moon american because we first led to do it or is it uh you know i just realized that the russians claimed venus because of the probe they sent there now now they're saying oh yeah we uh we went there so that's our planet now well the yeah stand by for the americans to go oh that's our planet you know that kind of stuff but uh so in other words uh do we have free license to exploit another planet just go there and and essentially rape its resources and and not you know in the movie let's see there was a tv series recently is anyone remember what it's called but essentially there was that concept where you first had some explorers going there and then you had commercialization of mars and and then they're trying to find uh resources and they did discover life and uh that sort of thing it i guess it's still in production because there's another um a year coming up on it i'm trying to remember the name of it but so i'm not going to spend i'm not going to talk much longer because we've already been an hour and 15 minutes or more into this but the idea is it's it's purely up to us as to how we if people if if we find life just because it's bacterial or whatever and not a dolphin are we going to just say well it has no value or are we just going to exploit a planet and you know the heck with the with the life there because it's the cost of business in other words and then is it going to be star wars or is it going to be star trek uh and are we thinking of aliens as greeters or eaters so that's kind of what i had to throw out there um as a idea about future ethics i may i may be just to kind of wrap things up with a closing thought here sort of exercising my executive position here but i i guess i'd just like to finally say that i'm not sure that the star trek prime directive of non-interference is a perfect solution um one of the drawbacks of the prime directive is withholding technology and knowledge from other from from uh other intelligent life forms that we find um ostensibly so that they can um are free to develop along their own path um but uh but uh but that element of sort of not helping the aliens uh when we could help them um is a real tension and you know can create hostility between us and the aliens because they want their you know they want us to help them or something like that or they resent the fact that we're withholding technology and things like that so um so even something that might seem as simple to apply as um the prime directive is actually fraught with all sorts of ethical dilemmas yeah there's been some good movies where the aliens have brought us good technology and such in other words and and care diseases and stuff but on the other hand perhaps they didn't share their weaponry right so yeah so maybe there's uh some kind of a middle ground uh so it doesn't have to be an absolute rule um so okay uh we are well over time so i want to thank my panelists for participating and for all the effort and thought you put into creating your presentations and uh want to thank our audience uh for all of their uh for attending and for all the great discussion going on in the nearby chat and i want to thank the science circle and shunt all on jess for hosting us with that i'll gavel us to a close