SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Unlocking and interpreting the secrets hidden in DNA used to be the province of scientists and medical researchers. But now it’s a growing business, one that’s selling genetic information directly to American consumers, making a DNA test as easy to buy as housewares or clothing.

JACK LORD (CEO, Navigenics): You know, I think for the history of man people have always wanted to see something about their future, and now, through the power of genetics and genomics, we are able to look into the future in a science-based way.

GONZALEZ: Jack Lord is the CEO of Navigenics. It’s a California-based company that for a fee of $999 offers its clients a personalized DNA test, one that pinpoints genetic markers indicating possible future threats to their health.

Jack Lord

JACK LORD: It’s really simple. It’s some saliva that we collect. We analyze that and then give you a report that shows what your risks are compared to people in the population at large. So today we test for 28 conditions, and they range from chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease, to cancers like melanoma or prostate cancer or breast cancer, to other conditions that are generally silent diseases like glaucoma and macular degeneration, celiac disease, to Alzheimer’s disease.

GONZALEZ: Navigenics is one of a growing number of new companies selling genetic tests directly to the public. All of them promise their clients better health and a better life by getting up close and personal with their DNA.

MIKE GODFREY (Navigenics Client): Once you log into the Navigenics site, you get a snapshot page here that just really outlines in these square boxes what you are at a high risk for, what you are at average risk for, and what you are at lower than average risk for.

GONZALEZ: Mike Godfrey, who works in corporate communications for a hospital in San Diego, is a Navigenics client. When he first got his DNA results back, Godfrey was surprised by his relative risk for several illnesses when compared to the rest of the population.

GONZALEZ (speaking to Mike Godfrey): …diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attack, brain aneurysm, obesity….

MIKE GODFREY: …atrial fibrillation, obesity…

GONZALEZ: That would seem to be a lot to be worried about.

MIKE GODFREY: …Graves disease, which I never even heard of before. So to be honest, in my initial reflection when I looked at this, I went whoa!

Personal trainer to Mike Godfrey: One more. That’s all you need. Just one more.

Mike Godfrey

GONZALEZ: Although he says he’s not overly concerned, Godfrey’s DNA test results have spurred him to think more about his health and spend a lot more time at the gym.

GODFREY: When you look through all of those orange boxes that we went through and you take a look, almost all of them say that you should keep your weight down, that you should stay in shape, that you should eat better. It was validation to me that, yeah, that was the right move and your money is being spent in the right place and the work you are going through is going to be worth it in the end.

GONZALEZ: Lord says his company offers tests only for treatable or preventable illnesses, giving clients an edge in anticipating and avoiding future health problems.

JACK LORD: And it is with that information that they can start to understand what they might do today to prevent an illness. If you know that in advance you can start going to your doctor more frequently to be checked, or you might start a medication that prevents that condition much earlier than when you become symptomatic.

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS (Navigenics Client): It doesn’t say you are going to die, here’s why. It says here are some things you are prone to, and here’s how you can prevent them from showing up in your body later.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Crosby-Helms, another Navigenics client, discovered through her test that she had a higher than usual genetic risk for both colon cancer and Crohn’s disease. The information got Crosby thinking about how much she really wanted to know about future threats to her health.

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS: For me, I would rather know that I have this genetic predisposition than to not know, and if that means that…

GONZALEZ: Ignorance isn’t bliss?

Sarah Crosby-Helms

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS: No, ignorance for me is not bliss.

GONZALEZ: The direct-to-consumer genetics testing industry says it promises its clients a glimpse over their health care horizon, warning them of possible dangers and threats to come. But critics aren’t so sure. They worry that the technology is being oversold and that it raises a host of both ethical and public policy concerns.

ALEXANDER CAPRON (Professor of Law and Medicine, USC): We don’t know everything about the relationship between genes and diseases, and even what we do know doesn’t really tell you that much about what should you do now.

GONZALEZ: Alexander Capron is a professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California and the former director of the ethics program at the World Health Organization. He’s concerned that as genetic tests become more common, a growing number of people will overemphasize DNA as the road to a long life and personal happiness.

ALEXANDER CAPRON: There are so many other things that are equally or more important and that are actually things that we should be more concerned about in our environment, in our human relations, in social justice, so that all people have an opportunity to have a life in which they can flourish and so forth, and not just narrowly, well, what’s your genetic code? I would also be aware that you could have some surprises that you really don’t want to know, that you would just as soon not have on your mind. What should you do now? What difference should this make in the way you behave, in the health care you get, in your relationships with loved ones, your plans for your future? Should you not take a certain job because the payoff in that job won’t come for ten or twenty years, and you have got a gene that says you have a twenty percent chance of getting breast cancer or something? What should you do with that information?

GONZALEZ: There are also concerns among some health experts about the regulation of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. Currently, no federal agency such as the Food and Drug Administration or Federal Trade Commission has come up with rules to monitor the companies’ marketing claims, testing practices, or the validity of results.

Alexander Capron

ALEXANDER CAPRON: I think we are still in early days on the regulation side, and the FDA has more work to do here. The field has grown, I think, faster than anyone expected.

GONZALEZ: Worried about the licensing, utility, and accuracy of direct-to-consumer genetic tests, some states, such as California and New York, have sent cease-and-desist letters to prominent DNA testing companies. Then there are the privacy worries and whether someone’s genetic information could leak out to insurance companies or employers. Lord acknowledges protecting genetic data is crucial to his company’s reputation and future.

JACK LORD: Privacy is to Navigenics like safety is to Volvo. We have to have — our brand is dependent on privacy and the integrity of privacy and security, and the visual that we use is imagine walking into a bank vault and inside that bank vault there are safe deposit boxes, and the only way you open that safe deposit box is if you have a key, and the bank has the key, and that’s the way we have built our systems. You have control over how that information is accessed, what it’s accessed for, and who actually has access.

GONZALEZ (speaking to Mike Godfrey): You’ve just shared a great deal of your genetic information with us. Do you have any privacy concerns, sharing it with us and by extension an audience across the country?

MIKE GODFREY: Obviously, I don’t.

GONZALEZ: Mike Godfrey’s confidence comes partially from the genetic nondiscrimination privacy act passed by Congress in 2008. It prohibits health insurers from denying coverage based solely on a person’s genetic predisposition.

MIKE GODFREY: My feeling is that those laws will be continued to be updated and that there won’t be much risk to me in the future or to anybody who does this. I think that this will become a pretty standard approach as you go into the future, for adults and maybe even for children when they are very young.

GONZALEZ: As he uses his genetic results to guide his heath decisions, Godfrey is also a test subject. He’s one of thousands of Navigenics clients who have volunteered to be monitored for the next twenty years as part of a scientific study. It’s purpose? To find out how—and if—people change their lifestyles after finding out what’s in their DNA.

Personal trainer to Mike Godfrey: Bring it all the way up.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Scientists have long found an association between relaxation and health. Now, there is new evidence that meditation and other spiritual practices have a beneficial and measurable effect on the brain. In a new book, “How God Changes Your Brain,” Andrew Newberg reports that meditation improves memory and reduces stress and that the kind of God you worship can affect the structure of your brain. Lucky Severson has the story.

VINCENT FEDOR (meditating and reciting mantra): Sa, ta, na, ma…

LUCKY SEVERSON: As unlikely as it may seem, Vincent Fedor is practicing meditation.

VINCENT FEDOR: …and you go into the whisper sa, ta, na, ma…

SEVERSON: Vincent and his wife, Judy, started meditation after they answered a questionnaire about improving their memory. That was one objective of Dr. Andrew Newberg. The other was that he wanted to scan their brains while they did it. Here are Vincent’s scans before he learned to meditate and after he had been doing it for eight weeks.

DR. ANDREW NEWBERG (University of Pennsylvania, with brain scans): Okay, so it is asymmetric, more active here than here, and after meditation it’s more active here than here. So simply doing the practice of the meditation he has altered the activity in this very, very important part of the brain, and this is really important, because this means he has changed the way his brain is working.

SEVERSON: Since meditating Vincent feels he’s become a better high school track coach.

VINCENT FEDOR: I think I’ve become a calmer, more tolerant person. If the situation comes up I don’t go to the angry side. I go take the calmer road. And you know, I think the kids see this. I think I’ve become a better coach because of it.

NEWBERG: It makes sense that if by doing this practice he has increased the activity in that frontal lobe, he’s actually able to improve the way in which he monitors his emotional responses to people and perhaps can treat them with more compassion.

SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg has studied nuns who do repetitive prayer, and he has seen the same kind of results. He’s been studying the effects of meditation and prayer on the brain for several years and is considered one of the leading experts in a new field called neurotheology.

DR. NEWBERG: We’ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over times.

SEVERSON: Here at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Spirituality and the Mind, images of the brain are taken during or after a person prays or meditates.

Dr. NEWBERG: The more you use a part of the brain the more blood flow it gets and the brighter or more red it looks on the scans.

SEVERSON: Over the years Dr. Newberg has adapted a 12-step mediation exercise that includes sound, movement, and breathing.

JUDY FEDOR: Sa, ta, na, ma. The first two minutes the mantra is sung. The second two minutes the mantra is whispered. The third sequence is silence, back into the whisper and finishing with the song. After that it’s deep breathing, holding in, that’s done three times, body relaxes, and the mantra is completed.

The minute I can start doing it and moving my fingers my body gets calmer. It’s very soothing. To me it gets almost in a passive mode, and then you have energy afterwards because you became so calm.

Dr. NEWBERG: Religion and spirituality do help to lower a person’s feelings of depression, anxiety, gives them some meaning in life, helps them to cope with things, and that’s going to have a potentially very beneficial effect.

SEVERSON: But Newberg has made another discovery, a controversial one, that our belief system, how we view God, can make a huge difference in how it affects our well being.  If we believe in a loving God it can have a positive effect, even prolong our lives. But believing in a judgmental, authoritarian God can produce fear, anger, and stress, and that’s not healthy.

Dr. NEWBERG: When it ultimately turns towards hatred, and whether it’s people who believe in abortion versus those who don’t, whether it’s just one religion versus another, when you hear rhetoric which is hateful, filled with anger, that turns on the different parts of the brain that are involved in our stress response and our anger response.

SEVERSON: George Handzo is a chaplain with the Healthcare Chaplaincy of New York City. He says Newberg’s conclusions, that a person’s belief in a certain kind of God can be unhealthy, is bound to be controversial among people of faith.

CHAPLAIN GEORGE HANDZO (Healthcare Chaplaincy of NYC): They’re saying that there is one word of God, and God commands us to follow that word, and if we want to save people from God’s anger and condemnation we’re obliged to get other people to believe as we do

Dr. NEWBERG: I’m not arguing that people need to change their beliefs per se.  I mean if they feel that their perspective on God is right, I mean then that’s terrific.  But I think that  what we have to all be careful about is the anger and the hatred. That’s what has detrimental effects both on the individual as well as on society as a whole.

SEVERSON: Skeptics of Newberg’s work question if science should be delving into religion and spirituality in the first place, and they ask if his research has actually proven much of anything.

HANDZO: Faith is, by definition, reliance on things you cannot see and cannot know. Faith is something we believe God gives to us. It’s not something we invent. As a person of faith, this whole debate about what is going to be knowable is not a particularly interesting question to me.

Dr. NEWBERG: You know, if we get a brain scan of somebody while they’re experiencing being in God’s presence, as I’ve always said, that doesn’t prove that God was in the room. It doesn’t prove that God wasn’t in the room. What it proves is that when the person had the experience of interacting with God this is what change was going on in their brain.

DONNA MORGAN: Can I just praise the Lord right now? I feel like if I don’t praise the Lord I’m going to bust…Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus…

SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg has found there are some religious practices where the person is intensely focused and others where they just allow themselves to be taken over, for example,  speaking in tongues. Dr. Newberg has scanned the brains of people of all belief systems, of people with no faith, and those of deep conviction, like Donna Morgan, who is a Pentecostal.

DONNA MORGAN: When are you in that realm of praise you just give over to the Holy Spirit. Then you let him take control, and when he’s taking control, right, you can speak in tongues, if you’ve been given that gift.

Dr. NEWBERG (with brain scans): Speaking in tongues you’re going to see that the frontal lobes are going to decrease in activity. So that means the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that normally makes them feel like they are in control of what they are doing, is shutting down.

SEVERSON (to Dr. Newberg): It is shutting down because…

Dr. NEWBERG: It is consistent with the feeling that they are not in charge of the process.

SEVERSON: There are some who argue that certain people are predisposed or hard-wired toward transcendent experiences, and some are not. It’s an argument Chaplain Handzo disagrees with.

HANDZO: I don’t believe in a God that creates people, especially selectively, in a way that makes it difficult for them to access this God. That’s not my God.

Dr. NEWBERG: I think to some degree we all are hard-wired to be able to think about things on these levels. It’s just a matter of how much we engage that and if we find a path that does help us to engage that for ourselves.

SEVERSON: Newberg says people of faith shouldn’t worry that his research will ever diminish their faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: I don’t think that our science is going to be able to definitively prove that God exists or doesn’t exist. It is, ultimately, a leap of faith.

SEVERSON: Newberg believes the number one activity that can exercise your brain and enrich your life is faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: When you have those kind of positive, optimistic beliefs in the world, in God or religion, depending on the person, that that really, over the long haul, seems to be the thing that really provides a benefit for us in terms our mental state and in terms of our physical health and well-being.

SEVERSON: As for his own faith, he describes himself as a searcher who is still searching. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Next Thursday, February 12, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and there will be many celebrations of his achievements. It’s also the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and this year is the 150th anniversary of his transforming book “On the Origin of Species.” We have a special report today on Darwin’s theory of evolution. That insight is almost universally accepted by scientists. But it directly contradicts the Bible’s creation story, and so it remains under attack by many people of faith. Indeed, Americans are almost evenly divided between those who accept Darwin’s theory and those who do not. Why is evolution still such a controversial idea? Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In the 1830s Darwin collected data on the vast variety of living things while he was a naturalist with the British navy on a five-year trip around the world. He later theorized that the earth was very old — that all life had evolved from simple organisms to the most complex. It followed that all humankind had evolved from a single ape-like ancestor. Kenneth Miller is a professor at Brown University.

Professor Kenneth Miller

Professor KENNETH MILLER (Division of Biology and Medicine, Brown University): Evolution is a great idea, but it’s also a dangerous idea. It’s an idea that threatens people’s understanding of the way things are, and for a century and a half people who are bothered by that idea have never stopped hoping that Darwin might turn out to be spectacularly, colossally, totally and completely wrong.

DE SAM LAZARO: Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian who led the Human Genome Project to decipher the genetic code.

Dr. FRANCIS COLLINS (Geneticist): There is no greater flashpoint right now in the tensions between science and faith than evolution. Ever since Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was published that tension has been flaring, and it seems, in my view, to be getting almost worse even after all of these years.

DE SAM LAZARO: Over many years of debate, people who accepted without question the Bible’s account of God’s creation, those sometimes called creationists, said Darwin’s theory was heresy. Loren Haarsma teaches physics at Calvin College in Michigan and is the author of a new book called “Origins.”

Professor LOREN HAARSMA (Physics and Astronomy Department, Calvin College): Many people are raised to believe a certain interpretation of Genesis, which is mostly literal, not completely literal, but implies a young Earth, and most people when they hear the Genesis story of God creating everything, they picture God miraculously creating everything.

DE SAM LAZARO: For come Christians, evolution came to be a synonym for atheism.

Prof. HAARSMA: There are Christians who agree that evolution equals atheism, and since they believe in God, since they’re convinced that God is real from their experiences of reading the Bible and worship, prayer, if God is true they conclude evolution must be false. So that idea that you have to choose between evolution or God is, I think, the main source of the problem — the main reason why this issue keeps coming up over and over again.

Professor Matthew Hamilton

DE SAM LAZARO: Some scientists also say part of the problem is misunderstanding about the meaning of the word “theory.” Matthew Hamilton teaches at Georgetown University.

Professor MATTHEW HAMILTON (Georgetown University): That word theory is used very differently in common parlance.  e might say something like, “Well, in theory I’m supposed to leave work early today,” and that would be a way of saying, “Well, I hope or I approximately think that this might be true.” But in science a theory is not a guess.

DE SAM LAZARO: For scientists, a theory is a testable explanation of how things work, based on observations and measurements. They say Darwin’s overall theory is the best explanation for the facts, although there do remain some unexplained gaps in the evidence.

Prof. HAARSMA: There are certain Christians who point to those areas and say, “Ah, here’s scientific evidence against evolution.” Scientists are worried about including too much emphasis on the gaps and the unknowns as a way of getting students to simply throw the whole theory out and say, “Ah, well, now I have a reason not to believe it.”

It’s easy to see how evolution can produce variation, how it can produce adaptation to environments. But can it really make more complex life forms? That’s an ongoing area of research. That’s one of those places where we have a gap in our knowledge. We have hints, we have ideas, we have hypotheses. We don’t have a lot of proofs.

The other big unknown, of course, is how did the first life start, and that’s the biggest question of all. Scientists are very far from a robust scientific explanation for how the first living cell came about, and so opponents of evolution point to that and say maybe that’s a place where there was a miracle.

Professor Loren Haarsma

DE SAM LAZARO: Evolution critics use what they see as flaws in the evidence in their continuing but losing campaign to have creationism taught in the schools alongside evolution.
More than 20 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that creationism could not be taught in science classes, that it was more religion than science, that teaching it in public schools would cross the line of separation between church and state. So creationists turned to other arguments.

(From video): There is, in fact, no entity in the known universe that stores and processes more information more efficiently than the DNA molecule.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of them was that some forms of life are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligent designer. That was at the heart of testimony in Dover, Pennsylvania.

RICHARD THOMPSON (President and Chief Counsel, Thomas More Law Center, Ann Arbor, MI):  We are going to argue that intelligent design is science, it’s not religion.

DE SAM LAZARO: But a federal judge ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and so should not be taught in science classes. This year the battle shifted to Texas, where creationists want the state board of education to continue its longstanding requirement that students examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories including evolution.

STEPHEN C. MEYER (Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture Discovery Institute, speaking before Board of Education): Teaching students about the strength and weaknesses of theories will engage their interest and turn a dry recitation of facts and propositions into an educational adventure.

Professor RONALD WETHERINGTON (Anthropology Department, Southern Methodist University, speaking before Board of Education): And I challenge anybody to show me or anyone else specific, identified details on the weaknesses of evolution. Nobody has.

DE SAM LAZARO: Despite the extremes of argument, many people of faith who are also scientists insist that evolution and religious belief need not conflict. For instance, they say God can work through evolution.

Dr. Francis Collins

Prof. HAARSMA: I think Christians are very — even Christians who oppose the theory of evolution — are comfortable saying God works through natural, scientifically understandable processes. If the majority of Christians could come to the place where they say, “I might or might not believe in evolution, but it’s OK for Christians to believe in evolution,” that would take some of the weight off. On the other side, it would be very helpful if science educators could find better ways to discuss how different religious views might view evolution.

Dr. COLLINS: If God, who is outside space and time, chose to create a universe and populate it with creatures in his image with whom he could have fellowship, who are we to say that the process that we as scientists have uncovered — the Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets and the mechanism of evolution to create life and ultimately human life — is not the way we would have done it? I find that enormously satisfying. Nothing that I know as a scientist is in contradiction to that. Nothing that I know as a believer is in contradiction to that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Meanwhile, the debate continues, creationists versus evolutionists. Next month, the Texas board of education will decide whether the state’s new science curriculum should continue to require discussion in science classes of the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s idea. The vote is expected to be close.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

PAMELA FERDIN (Animal Rights Activist): Excuse me, can I give you a leaflet about the torture and murder of primates going inside the laboratories of UCLA?

SAUL GONZALEZ: On a recent afternoon, a group of activists gathered outside the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to protest the use of animals in laboratory research at the school.

Ms. FERDIN: It’s immoral. It’s unethical and evil to take non-consenting animals and, against their will, do these horrific things.

GONZALEZ: These demonstrators are peaceful, but in the last few years more militant animal rights activists have waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against UCLA scientists involved in animal experimentation, such as using primates to investigate methamphetamine and nicotine addiction. The activists’ tactics have ranged from publishing researchers’ home addresses on Web sites to leaving threatening telephone messages.

VOICE OF UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Quit working on animals. Quit torturing and abusing animals. We can cause more economic damage in one night than you can earn in a year.

GONZALEZ: UCLA faculty members even have had pipe bombs planted at their homes. These episodes have created a climate of fear among researchers on campus.

John Hueston

JOHN HUESTON (Attorney, UCLA): The point of boiling really began happening when people realized that they couldn’t live in their homes any longer and that they began having to check under their cars for bombs — that they could not leave their kids home alone at night for fear people would show up, pound on the doors, break things, maybe enter the house.

GONZALEZ: Federal law enforcement authorities say such incidents are on the rise nationally and reflect some activists’ increased willingness to use more extreme methods in their struggle to fight animal experimentation. UCLA, which declined our requests to shoot its research facilities, has successfully fought for a restraining order prohibiting animal rights activists from harassing researchers.

Nationally, a larger debate continues over the morality of using animals in laboratory experimentation, like these scenes captured by activists’ hidden cameras. Although exact numbers don’t exist, it’s believed millions of animals, from primates to pigs to rats, are used as test subjects in more than 1,000 laboratories in the United States.

Central to the controversy over the use of animals in scientific and medical research is this question: When, if ever, should the pain and discomfort inflicted on animals in laboratory experimentation outweigh the possible benefits the research might create for human beings?

Dr. JOHN YOUNG (Director, Comparative Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles and Chairman, Americans for Medical Progress): The use of animals is a vital cornerstone to medical progress. and I would submit to you that if you would abolish the use of animals in medical research today, medical progress would slow, stop, and reverse.

GONZALEZ: Doctor John Young is director of comparative medicine at Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and chairman of Americans for Medical Progress, a pro-animal testing group. He says animal experimentation is vital to finding treatments for such illnesses as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease in human beings.

Cedars-Sinai and Doctor Young gave us unusual access to facilities in the hospital where animals used in medical and scientific research are kept, such as these pigs used to test human heart implant devices.

Dr. YOUNG: The cardiovascular system of a pig is almost identical to that of a human being, okay. The coronary arteries, the heart muscle — virtually identical, so pigs are a favorite model for cardiovascular disease.

GONZALEZ: The human ramifications of this research would be what?

Dr. YOUNG: Improved care of cardiac patients.

GONZALEZ: But many animal rights groups say such research ignores the rights and interests of the test subjects.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: It is my pleasure to introduce Professor Peter Singer.

GONZALEZ: Ethicist and writer Peter Singer is one of the founders of the modern animal rights movement. He believes that in the Western world religion has played a partial but key role in justifying humans’ exploitation of animals, including in scientific research.

Professor Peter Singer

Dr. PETER SINGER (Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Center for Human Values, Princeton University): This idea that so much of our ethics flows out of that Judeo-Christian tradition which, of course, separates us from animals, puts this gulf between us, tells us that we alone were made in the image of God and they are not, that we have an immortal soul and they don’t. So it puts a sharp division between us, which, if we understand evolutionary theory correctly, there isn’t really that sharp division.

GONZALEZ: Although Singer says he supports very limited animal research that could lead to medical breakthroughs, he believes scientists and doctors too often conduct experiments that are unnecessary and ignore the distress inflicted on animals.

Dr. SINGER: Why is it that being a member of our species is morally important, is morally significant, whereas being a fellow sentient being, a fellow animal, if you like, why is that not important? And if it’s useful or beneficial or useful to us in some way to do something that might cause pain and suffering to the animal, that’s okay because they’re not members of our species? And I refer to this as “speciesism.” I think it is a parallel phenomenon, in some ways, to racism or sexism in just saying, “Well, we are the dominant group. We are the ones that matter and those outside beyond this boundary of our species just really don’t matter.”

Dr. YOUNG (showing off cancer mice in cages): So if you look under the skin of this mouse right here, that’s human prostate cancer.

GONZALEZ: Dr. Young says that researchers involved in animal experimentation take all possible precautions to reduce pain and suffering in their test subjects.

Dr. YOUNG: We watch these animals very, very closely, and when they begin to exhibit clinical signs indicating that the cancer is adversely affecting their health, we put them to sleep.

GONZALEZ: However, Doctor Young does argue that the benefits animal research creates for human beings should always be of paramount importance.

Dr. John Young

Dr. YOUNG: People will ask me, how can you possibly do what you do? I can answer that question very easily. I walk them over to the pediatric cancer ward and show them children with bald heads with glioblastoma, brave children who will tell you, “I am terminal.” We are curing rats with the same disease at a 70 percent cure rate. I am excited about that. It would be immoral, in my opinion, not to have done what we’ve done in the rats.

GONZALEZ: But federal research institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health, have pledged to reduce the number of animals in laboratory testing. They’re exploring alternative research methods, such as experimenting on human cell cultures and using computer simulations to test treatments. But Peter Singer says efforts to remove animals from experimentation have been too slow and half-hearted in the scientific community.

Dr. SINGER: I think the whole institution is set up at the moment with a bias towards experimenting on animals and using them as subjects, because that’s what we have done for decades now.

GONZALEZ: As the controversy over animal research continues, so too does the debate over how human beings should balance their self-interest with their concern for the health and welfare of other living creatures.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

Religious Leader at the Memorial Service: Gracious and loving God, we gather in this solemn place to remember the lives and mourn the deaths of these that have given so much. Even in death they reached out to those in need of help.

ERIN DEEGAN (University of Maryland Medical Student): We ended up having many discussions while we were going through anatomy lab on moral issues and spiritual issues, and I think it really opens up a forum for a spiritual discussion, because we end up believing different things, but we all appreciate the fact that these bodies are there for our use.

HANLEY: The students come to view the donors’ bodies as teaching tools, with a distinct separation between the physical and the spiritual.

Erin Deegan

Ms. DEEGAN: Seeing this person there in front of you it’s hard to separate the body from the person, and it takes some time. But I think in the end my faith helped me, because I knew that it was just a body and not a person that I was working on.

HANLEY: Still, when they meet the families they gain a deeper respect for their donors.

Ms. DEEGAN: To be able to see the families and to really feel what they are feeling and to know that these were their relatives and friends and people they really cared for helps me to place it in perspective.

HANLEY: For some of the families, this is the only memorial service their loved ones will have. Donors’ bodies go directly to the state anatomy board after death, and there often is no funeral. Eventually, their ashes are interred near this monument.

LYNN BOOKSTARR (Family Member): I appreciate having this opportunity to honor my parents, both of whom gave their bodies to science, and I also carry a card, and so I will be interred here eventually.

HANLEY: Some family members come to the service every year to remember their relatives and friends. In a few cases, they are inspired to become donors themselves.

Lynn Bookstarr

Ms. BOOKSTARR: Because I know eventually I will be interred here it gives me a sense not only of the eternal life of those I loved, but also of my — continuing after my death in some way, have my body contribute, and I believe that the soul leaves the body at the time of death and that my soul will be here, as my parents’ souls are here.

Chaplain at the Memorial Service: May their memory inspire us to live justly and kindly. May their souls be at peace, and may they be bound up in the bond of eternal life. And let us say: Amen.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Parents want to give their children every advantage in life—music lessons, tutoring, sports camps. They also want to do whatever is possible to make their children healthy. But what about going beyond opportunities and health to enhancement, making kids bigger or smarter or more talented? Science is opening that door in a big way, and many ethicists debate where the line between health and enhancement should be. Kim Lawton has our story.

KIM LAWTON: Twelve-year-old Mitchell Greenwood has a nightly ritual. Before he goes to bed, he gives himself a shot of human growth hormone. Mitchell is healthy, but at 4′1″ he’s below the normal height for his age.

MITCHELL GREENWOOD: I’m just hoping that I get those couple of inches that I really wanted, that I’m taking it for.

LAWTON: Do some of the kids make fun of you? Are kids mean?

MITCHELL: Yeah. Well, like, some of my friends, they’re just like, “Ha, ha, shorty.” And I know they they’re just joking. But then there are also some people that do it to be mean.

LAWTON: Mitchell is genetically predisposed to be short. His mom, Lisa, is 5′3″ and Doug, his dad, is 5′4″. Their doctor projected that Mitchell may not get any taller than 5′1″ and he suggested human growth hormone might help add two or three more inches to that. They decided to try it.

LISA GREENWOOD: For Mitch, there have already been things in his life that he’s wanted to do that he’s been unable to do because he’s too small. I think that parents will always choose the things that will help their kids grow to be happier, more productive adults.

DOUG GREENWOOD: Some with reason and some without reason, you know. I think this has been a reasonable choice that we’ve made.

LAWTON: But as biotechnology advances, some ethicists are raising moral concerns about the extent to which parents may try to make even more radical alterations.

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and author of the new book THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION. He warns of a slippery slope in the drive toward enhancement.

Michael Sandel

Professor MICHAEL SANDEL (Department of Government, Harvard University): Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society—that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless. It has—there is no end. In fact, one can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race, or genetic arms race, whether it’s to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future.

LAWTON: Scientists have mapped human DNA, making it possible to know what genes are responsible for particular illnesses. Clinical trials are now underway to find new treatments for genetically-based diseases. But what if this newfound genetic knowledge is used not only to cure, but also to enhance physical and mental capabilities and to enable parents to select the traits of their children? In 2003, the FDA approved the use of human growth hormone for healthy children who have no defined cause for their short stature.

Dr. PAUL KAPLOWITZ (Pediatric Endocrinologist, Children’s National Medical Center): The decision was controversial because there were a lot of people who felt that this was cosmetic treatment—like why take a normal child and put them on a medication that their body is probably making some of anyway just in order to make them grow taller?

LAWTON: Paul Kaplowitz is the pediatric endocrinologist treating Mitchell Greenwood. Although some of his colleagues treat normal height children who want to be taller, Kaplowitz says he would not.

Dr. KAPLOWITZ: If I see those children I simply say, “You know, this is not an appropriate use of growth hormone. Your child may be shorter than you would like, but they’re fine. They will reach a normal height.” And furthermore, I tell them that, you know, if we insist on treating them, we are sending them the message that there is something wrong with them. They are not okay the way they are.

LAWTON: Sandel says he does support the use of new biotechnologies to cure illness.

Prof. SANDEL: My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids.

Gregory Stock

LAWTON: But according to UCLA professor Gregory Stock, author of the book REDESIGNING HUMANS, the line between therapy and enhancement is never clear-cut.

Professor GREGORY STOCK (Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavior, UCLA): Any time there is a reduction in some disease process, in some affliction which we can all support, the possibility exists of other enhancements, and I see this as a very robust development. I don’t see that we’re moving toward some sort of a cliff.

LAWTON: Few people think twice about getting their kids braces, but what about genetic help to boost their memory? Stock’s company, Signum Biosciences, is researching therapies for Alzheimer’s patients. He’s not concerned that parents might also use that therapy to help their children do better in school.

Prof. STOCK: If we could enhance our memories, to me that superficially seems desirable. It’s not clear that it would be of as much value as we want, or that it’s as necessary since we have all sorts of electronic devices that are essentially memory enhancers.

LAWTON: Technologies are also moving forward that may one day allow parents to pre-select various traits, including personality or temperament. In Scarsdale, New York, Dr. Andrew Silverman is already helping parents choose the gender of their children. Most couples come to him for family balancing. Silverman is Jewish and says he initially did have ethical concerns, until he consulted with a rabbi.

Dr. ANDREW SILVERMAN (The Silverman Center for Gender Selection): He says he doesn’t see a problem. He said, “You are helping couples procreate. You’re not destroying life, you are creating life. You are a partner with God. Go ahead.”

LAWTON: Still, Silverman says he would draw a moral line at helping parents pick other qualities, such as personality.

Andrew Silverman

Dr. SILVERMAN: I’m sure there’ll be other professionals who will. If it’s available and it’s not illegal, people will offer it. You know, the greatest joy and mystery of life is seeing how your kids turn out, because they are in the same home environment. They have relatively the same genetic spread, assuming it’s the same marriage. Then how they turn out is the wonderment of life.

LAWTON: Professor Sandel opposes sex selection because he believes it changes the parent-child relationship.

Prof. SANDEL: The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don’t pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order.

Prof. STOCK: Is it the child that is being damaged by being the gender of choice of that parent? I don’t think so. Who is being injured if parents have a predilection for certain types of personality and temperament, if they would be more comfortable or think they really would prefer to have a child who’s a little more outgoing, or who’s more introverted, or who is a little brighter?

LAWTON: Stock believes there is a moral responsibility to push forward with research, trusting that human beings have a great capacity for adapting to technology.

Prof. STOCK: So, you know, where is this going to lead us? We don’t really know. And to sort of be engaged in this process, which is changing the world around us, which is, you know, changing ourselves, which is life beginning to get control of its own processes and to act upon that information, and to me it’s awe-inspiring.

LAWTON: Such power is precisely what worries Sandel.

Prof. SANDEL: In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion—over Nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy. But parenthood is a school for humility.

LAWTON: And there are larger social questions, such as cost.

Dr. KAPLOWITZ: A course of growth hormone to add an extra couple of inches could easily get close to $100,000, and the question is who is paying for this? Well, in most situations the insurance companies are paying for this.

LAWTON: Some worry about the creation of two very separate classes of people: those who can afford genetic enhancements and those who cannot.

Prof. SANDEL: It will only deepen the gap between rich and poor and possibly inscribe that gap in our biology.

LAWTON: Already, many parents compete to give their children every possible advantage. There are tutoring and private coaching lessons. Would they consider genetic enhancements as well?

WENDY: If there was a drug or something that people had, and it was like they could prove that it wasn’t harmful, I don’t know how people would react. I mean, we can all say we wouldn’t do those things, but it’s hard to say.

GREG: If you found out there was possibilities you haven’t thought of, and the research was done to make it safe, but then you might end up with the Bionic Man or Wonder Woman or something like that. I don’t think that would be right.

MARA: I just think that you don’t play God.

LAWTON: For Doug and Lisa Greenwood, it came down to doing what they thought was physically and emotionally best for Mitchell.

Ms. GREENWOOD: I think it’s easy to have this debate when it is just a debate that you’re having. But when you are faced with, well, your child could be 5′1″ or maybe he will be 5′5″ or 5′6″ you are going to choose 5′5″ or 5′6″.

Mr. GREENWOOD: You want to give your kids the very, very best so they can have opportunities that you haven’t had in education. And growth is certainly one of them—and health.

LAWTON: With new technological breakthroughs, those decisions will only get more complicated in the years to come, and society will have to grapple with what should be allowed. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Q: Why did you write THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION?

A: I initially became interested in the subject through my service on the President’s Council on Bioethics. One of the topics we dealt with was the question of enhancement and genetic engineering for enhancement, and I became fascinated by the topic there and began teaching a course that dealt with these issues and wrote what initially was an article in The Atlantic. Both got into this book. What intrigued me most about it was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology. What struck me as especially interesting was that our usual way of talking about ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy didn’t seem to capture fully what’s at stake in the debate over genetic engineering. We usually debate costs and benefits, autonomy and rights. But that moral vocabulary doesn’t really seem to capture what’s at stake in this whole question of genetic engineering and eugenics. That, I think, is really what intrigued me most: If not autonomy and rights and utility, then what? That was why it was a philosophical challenge.

Q: What is at stake? You say these questions are almost theological.

A: Yes. Really to grapple with the ethics of enhancement requires us, I think, to confront questions that have been crowded from view in the modern world, certainly within modern philosophy. It raises fundamental questions that really do verge on theological questions: What is the proper stance of human beings toward the given world? What is the proper stance toward nature? Are there certain limits to the project of human mastery and dominion? Those are questions in moral philosophy, but they are also questions of theology and of religion.

Q: Have the teachings of faith traditions addressed these issues—whether man should aim for perfection?

A: Yes, different religious traditions give different broad perspectives on this question. Some sanctify nature as inscribed with inherent meaning. Others see the moral importance of nature as flowing from the fact of God’s creation. And there are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come. On the one hand, human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings’ role with God’s. So the tension between these two impulses-—to participate in creation and yet not to overreach-—that, I think, is at the crux of some of the most interesting theological aspects of this debate.

Q: Where do you draw the line between trying to heal and trying to enhance?

A: I draw the line with health, with medical purposes. So I think it is one thing to try to restore normal human functioning—that would be health, that would be medicine, that would be curing or repairing. I think it’s something else to try to use biotechnology to enhance, to try to lift people above the norm, let’s say, of intelligence, or of height, or of musical ability, or to try to pick and choose the genetic traits of our children, to aim at designer children, to choose the sex of our children for purely non-medical reasons. These are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don’t have the same moral weight as medicine or health.

Q: But as a parent don’t you want the best for your children?

A: What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life. I suppose you could say that those goals could be captured in the idea of wanting the best for my children. But very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college. Never mind college, some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially. So I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I’m not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

Q: You have said maybe we should change the driven climate of the culture, and perhaps this quest for perfection really undermines the sacredness of the child-parent relationship.

A: I think part of being a parent, to love one’s child, is to accept them as they come—not to see them as instruments of our ambition or as creatures to be molded, as if they were themselves commodities. I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child. That’s the phenomenon of hyper-parenting. I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed.

Q: You talk about gifts. Is that a religious argument?

A: Yes and no. It’s true that to speak of an ethic of giftedness, which is very much the ethic that I deploy in raising questions about designer children and genetic engineering—an appreciation of the giftedness of the child or the giftedness of life does have religious resonance, because a great many religious traditions emphasize the sense in which the good things in life are not all our own doing; they are gifts from God. So that is one source of an ethic of giftedness, a religious source—the idea of God as giver of gifts. But what I argue in the book is that that is one important source for the ethic of giftedness but not the only source. It’s possible to make sense of what’s morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift—in this case, the child—not be wholly our own doing, our own product. So I think there is a religious source, but I want to make room for religious discourse in arguments about bioethics and also for an ethical appreciation of these ideals and values by those who may not come from a religious tradition.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don’t choose the kind of child that we have. In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion-—over nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy. But parenthood is a school for humility. We can’t choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls “an openness to the unbidden.” I think this quality, as a trait of character, as a moral disposition—an openness to the unbidden—teaches us to rein in the impulse to mastery and control that we experience in so many other parts of our lives.

Q: What technologies really concern you, like non-medical sex selection? Say a family has five girls and wants a son. What would you ban or not ban and why?

A: My emphasis in the book is not on banning or regulating. I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large. I would include non-medical sex selection as one of those practices that I think is morally questionable and that can carry adverse social consequences. We see, in some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys—and it’s usually for boys—reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances—in China, in Korea, in India—in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls. So that’s one social consequence. But another consequence is really to our culture, to our moral landscape. The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don’t pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good. If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

Q: What would a “perfect” society look like if parents did pick the traits of their children?

A: By a perfect society you mean a dystopian society?

Q: Yes.

A: I think [there are] two kinds of risks. One has to do with the life of the children who would not only feel molded and made and packaged almost as commodities by their parents, but might feel the intense pressures that go with that, because if parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable. So that’s one, the effect on the child. The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches-—that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can’t fully control and for which we aren’t fully responsible.

Q: You see troubling comparisons with the eugenics movement.

A: I do think there is a similarity between the dark history of eugenics and present attempts to pick and choose the genetic traits of children. There is one very important difference. Traditionally, eugenics was state-sponsored and coercive. They were collectivist, and so there was the dark history of forced sterilization. The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide. So the real question is: If you remove the coercion and you make it an individual choice, is eugenics still objectionable? I would say that it is. What we have today is a kind of privatized or free-market eugenics. It’s not an attempt to try to improve entire societies or to increase humanity’s germ plasm, as the old eugenicists said. It’s an attempt, usually by affluent parents, to give their kids an edge in a highly competitive society. But it does carry the idea, which comes from the eugenic past, that it is for this generation to pick and choose the genetic traits of the next generation.

Q: And it’s only for those who can afford it.

A: In the privatized version, it’s only for those who can afford it. So a further objection now to eugenics is that it will only deepen the gap between rich and poor, and possibly inscribe that gap in our biology. That is also a troubling prospect.

Q: Should faith communities speak out? If it is just left up to the marketplace, will that determine who can afford the technology? Should there be more discussion, and should religious groups get involved?

A: Yes, I do think this is an issue that faith groups should become involved in, because it does raise questions about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. It involves the tension between the aspiration to human mastery, control, and dominion over nature, over children, over future generations-—the tension between mastery and dominion, on the one hand, and reverence, or respect, or restraint, or humility, on the other. And most religious traditions speak to this deep human tension between mastery and restraint, between dominion and humility. I think that’s the kind of moral vocabulary we need to make sense of the challenge posed by new genetic technologies. Unless faith communities participate in public debate about these questions, that part of the moral vocabulary will not find full expression.

Q: What is morally owed to those who suffer from disease or disability if not healing or trying to make them more perfect, healthier? Is there a higher good than relief of suffering?

A: The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease—these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine. I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can’t combat dread diseases—malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it. So my argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society. I think morally those two ambitions have a very different status. One of the differences is that aiming at health, restoring health—that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing. But aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society—that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless. There is no end. In fact, one can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race or genetic arms race, whether it’s to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future. So it’s limitless, and that’s another of the features that sets it apart from medical intervention. It really puts biotechnology in the service not only of health but of consumerism, really, and the drive for better consumer goods than one’s neighbor has, or than one had last year. This is a kind of limitless spiral, and even from the standpoint of resources I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.

Q: You mentioned the Presidents Bioethics Council, and stem cell research has been a huge subject there. What needs to be done about stem cell research? What are the moral arguments?

A: In my criticism of genetic engineering for enhancement I am more in line with what my colleagues on the council thought than in my views on embryonic stem cell research. I’m a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research. The most fundamental question is: What is the moral status of the early embryo or blastocyst, which is destroyed in the course of stem cell research? And so those who view the blastocyst, the very early unimplanted embryo-—we are not, of course, talking about a fetus, but an unimplanted embryo in a lab-—there are some who believe that blastocyst has a moral status equal to that of a baby or of a fully developed human being, and if they’re right about that then embryonic stem cell research should not be permitted. I don’t think they are right about it, but in the book I try to take seriously their arguments and to address them. I think it’s important, where moral arguments do inform political views, to welcome those religious arguments into the public sphere; not to exclude them and say no, no, no, that has no place; to welcome them but also to engage with those views, to test them, to argue with them, and in some cases to learn from them. So my argument about stem cell research in the book defends it, but only after taking seriously the religious objections that people raise based on the moral status of the embryo.

Q: Defend it based on what?

A: Mainly the way I try to go about engaging with the debate about the moral status of the embryo is to try to lay out what I take to be the strongest possible arguments in favor of regarding the blastocyst as morally equivalent to a baby and then seeing whether those arguments can be sustained, whether they are adequate arguments. So I think that it’s important not to—just as faith-based arguments should not be kept out of the public arena, neither should they be exempt from critical scrutiny and rigorous philosophical argument.

Q: What is your reasoning to support the view that embryonic stem cell research is moral?

A: The main way of arguing is to see whether those who object to embryonic stem cell research on the grounds that the blastocyst is morally equivalent to a person—whether they are prepared to pursue the full moral logic of that position. And if they were, then you would not only restrict, as President Bush has, federal funding of embryonic stem cell research; you would ban all embryonic stem cell research. Right now, the Bush position is that it shouldn’t enjoy federal funding, for the most part, but it should be permitted in the private sector. If it were truly infanticide, if destroying that embryo were really morally equivalent to infanticide, you wouldn’t say we should deny federal funding to this infanticide but we should allow it to continue in the private sector. Take the example of yanking organs from babies to save other people’s lives. You wouldn’t permit that. Not only that; you would not permit fertility clinics to create and discard excess embryos if you really regarded those excess embryos as siblings of the children who were implanted and created. You wouldn’t say, well, we’ll ban embryonic stem cell research or deny it federal funding, but we’ll let fertility clinics create and discard thousands upon thousands of frozen embryos. You wouldn’t permit it, and yet many of the people who want to restrict embryonic stem cell research are not raising their voices to shut down fertility clinics that create and discard excess embryos. So it’s a test of consistency, mainly. Now some are consistent and would shut down fertility clinics that create and discard excess embryos. There is a further test for them, which is: In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality. And what about the religious traditions that consider those lost embryos as infant deaths? Do they mandate the same burial rites for lost embryos as for babies who die just after birth, and if not, why not? So it’s a test. And this is not to parody the religious position; it’s to take it seriously and to explore its moral logic and to see whether that moral logic is carried out fully by those who profess to hold the position in the specific case of embryonic stem cell research, but not in all of these others.

Q: Does Jewish teaching about the importance of doing everything to save a life influence your thinking on this and other bioethical topics?

A: I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I’ve tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings in this area. It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church. And so that may have influenced me, but I think I’ve also been influenced by arguing through these questions with colleagues on the President’s Council on Bioethics, with students, and with others, some from religious backgrounds, others not. I do think it is very important that the religious communities do try to bring their teachings and their insights to bear on the stem cell debate and on the debate about genetic engineering.

Q: What kind of research are you doing?

A: Here at Signum we are trying to do some things that are very interesting, in that the opening up of human biology and of biology and of life in general and understanding how it works at the most intimate of levels allows the possibility of going in and creating new kinds of therapeutics that are really designed, in some sense, but it also allows us to revisit the products of literally thousands of years of experimentation with herbal medicine, with various kinds of botanicals, and to understand the components of those and the agents therein that are really working and how they are affecting biology, because cells have been battling with one another since the beginning of life. And so all of the kinds of pharmaceutical developments, pharmaceutical possibilities that will affect major regulatory pathways in our bodies—most of them are out there. That’s why so many botanicals have been used as major drugs, if not as the origins or the starting points of additional, more advanced therapeutics. So we’re looking at Alzheimer’s. We have a new class of anti-inflammatories that can be used both in dermal and skin applications and potentially for a lot of diseases where inappropriate inflammation, either acute or chronic for long periods of time, are associated with particular diseases.

Q: What are you hoping some of the practical applications will be?

A: For instance, we’ve been looking at a key regulatory network that is called PB2A—protein phosphatase 2A—which removes phosphates from regulatory enzymes. There are many, many other enzymes that add phosphates, because those alter the activity of various regulatory enzymes. So this is kind of a master regulator. We have looked at botanicals that have active elements that affect that global regulation. An example of one of those is coffee. That has something in it that is affecting that strongly. Coffee has all sorts of epidemiology associated with health benefits. People who drink four or more cups of coffee a day—it doesn’t matter whether it is caffeinated or decaffeinated—have a reduction in Type 2 diabetes, or a reduced incidence of Type 2 diabetes, of about fifty percent. The same with Parkinson’s, although there it is more related to the caffeine. So if you can identify that compound, then you have the potential for a very strong preventive for Type 2 diabetes. There is a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. So coffee is actually a pretty good thing to be taking, and there are probably a number of therapeutics that are in both that and other botanicals that are in wide use, in fact such wide use that we don’t even think of them as herbals any more.

Q: What about genetic engineering?

A: Another aspect of [this is] basically opening up biology, of understanding our workings at a very intimate level, at a deep enough level so that we can imagine not just understanding but actually tweaking it in a variety of ways, altering it, adjusting it. It’s clear that the long course, the trajectory of human investigation of ourselves is partially driven by curiosity, but the real program has been to understand ourselves well enough, and life well enough, that we can begin to intervene in those processes. We’re at the point where that’s beginning to be possible. You can see that in the hype associated with the human genome project—that we’re going to have all sorts of interventions that are based on our genetics. Those have not really come to pass, but it doesn’t mean that that larger vision of the possibilities of those kinds of interventions is false. We get a little bit exuberant about these things in the early stages, because you don’t see all the problems that are going to arise, all the complexities. So people who project forward five or ten or fifteen years are often way too aggressive. But if you go forward 25 or 50 or 75 years, it’s amazing how conservative people’s projections are, because they don’t see the breakthroughs that transform the landscape. And so many of the ethical issues that are arising now—it’s not so much with the interventions that are possible today, but the interventions that are quite plausible tomorrow, that we could actually begin to intervene in the processes of life, to alter ourselves. We’ve certainly used technology in very powerful ways. We’ve taken technology, and we’ve altered the world around us. In New York City, people are walking through these valleys of concrete and stainless steel and glass. This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors. Now technology is becoming so potent and so precise that we’re beginning to turn it back on ourselves. The implications are obviously profound, and they will really bring into question what it means to be a human being and how we differ from other life and from non-life as well, where we’re beginning to breathe a level of complexity into inorganic matter, into sand—silicone dioxide, this inert substance at our feet. We are breathing a level of complexity that rivals life itself. Nothing is ever going to be the same. So, naturally, it evokes questions of morality, of purpose, of who we are, of what we will become, which are the most contentious of issues.

Q: A lot of people take a look at these things and jump ahead to what you call the sci-fi scenarios. How do you respond to people who leap to the worst-case scenario when they think about where this might lead?

A: I think that understanding where these possibilities will lead is very, very difficult, because we’re looking through this haze. We really can’t see where these things are going to go. We can make some strong statements in that the dynamic involved is very, very powerful. It’s not as though we have to seek out to do weird sorts of things. We’re engaged in funding tens of billions of dollars to try and understand biology so that we can develop new therapeutics, which everyone supports. Part of those understandings means that the bar is significantly lowered for doing other kinds of adjustments that many people would find more problematic. But I think the projections that we make that are often how we’re going to be afflicted by this knowledge demonstrate more about our own fears than they do about where we will actually go. The same thing on the other side, where we make fantastic predictions about the possibilities and all of the ills that will be removed from humanity and from society by this technological process. I think both of those are extreme, and they say a lot more about our hopes and fears than about where anything is going to go.

To me, it’s clear that this is a very robust development. I think that if you look at the risks and rewards involved, there are far more rewards involved than risks. I think that most of the issues—the real risks were things like “This is going to get out of hand and afflict us with plagues” and damages of that sort. I think that those are relatively unlikely. I think the real dangers of the technology are that we will use it in ways that are very negative. It’s not that somebody is going to try and do genetic screening on an embryo to try and enhance our lives, or to reduce disease. The things that are coming out of a sense of contributing, of adding to the quality of life, in one way or another—I don’t think that those are likely to be the things that are the most dangerous. The things that will be dangerous are to use these understandings to develop new diseases, to create terrorist weapons, things of that sort which, by and large, are not going to be constrained by regulation. So my feeling is that you have to have a certain amount of faith in our ability or the ability of future humans to make decisions about their lives that will be as sensible as the kinds of decisions that we are trying to make about our lives and about the immediate things that affect us. And for us to try and project forward into the distant future often—at least distant as far as the technologies that may be present—and try to control that in some way shows a real lack of respect for the ability of future humans—of our children, of their children—to make judgments that are in their interest, because the things that really are going to be problems are things that we don’t even begin to see now. I can virtually guarantee that. Anybody who looked at email and the Internet—who was worried about spam? No one. We just can’t see these sorts of things. And so, to me, it’s very spiritual to realize the immensity of the changes that are under way right now. They are so dramatic that if you were to push forward even a hundred years, it is mind-boggling, if technology continues to advance at the pace that it’s doing now or at an accelerated pace. And that seems quite likely. So where is this going to lead us? We don’t really know. To be engaged in this process which is changing the world around us, which is changing ourselves, which is life beginning to get control of its own processes and to act upon that information—to me, it’s awe-inspiring. It’s such a privilege to be alive at this instant in time and to be able to see these immense things, because in my view a million years from now—and I see this as a very robust development; I don’t see that we’re moving toward some sort of cliff—but that when future humans, whatever they are, whoever they are, look back on this moment, I think they’re going to look at it as this incredible instant in time when all of these things occurred, when we animated the inanimate, when we breathed life essentially into things that were previously inanimate, when we began to alter our own biology. The very foundation of what they are and who they are will have been established in this moment, in these hundred years. Here we are at this instant of departure, an evolutionary transition that is, in my view, as large as that when single-celled organisms started to come together to form multi-cellular organisms is happening right now. To me, it’s amazing to be able to watch it and to participate in it.

Q: When you use language like that it sounds almost religious. There is a God-like quality of breathing life into inanimate objects, no matter what religious tradition you’re talking about. Does that trouble you at all, human beings taking on that kind of power? What are some of the moral ramifications?

A: I look at it in a broader sense. I don’t put human beings outside of the processes of life and of nature. And so it’s inspiring that nature is achieving a level of complexity that can begin to reflect back upon itself and alter itself in conscious ways as well as in unconscious ways. Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It’s an emergent property. So we’re at this transition between unconsciousness and consciousness and awareness and these levels of activity. So, to me, I’m not troubled by it at all. I like to be able to see it, to be able to have this evocation of these possibilities. And I’m sensible enough to see that it’s not me that’s seeing this; it’s this larger cluster of human activity, almost a super-organism that is able to observe and see all of these things. These possibilities are not coming from individuals; they’re coming from the huge clusterings of activity, where we have computers and scientific research that’s happening in thousands of laboratories all over the world that are cohering together, and that we—through telecommunications, our ability to integrate all sorts of diverse activities that would otherwise be beyond our ken—we can see all of these things. It almost feels like it’s us doing it, but we’re just a part of this larger process. So, to me, it’s why should we be troubled by the nature of the universe, because it’s not exactly what—people will go, “If I were designing things, I’d do it a little differently.” Well, you know, we’re in the middle of a world that is incredibly beautiful, awe-inspiring, that has been constructed with all of these possibilities and these dynamics that are now emerging and we get to see, and that we would sit back and then critique that and say, “Well, I find that very troubling that this is the world that exists”—it’s a conceit to me and a lack of an understanding of an acceptance that we are a part of this; we’re not back away from it, observing in a God-like sense.

Q: Philosopher Michael Sandel talks about mastery and control of humanity and nature. He suggests that’s what we’re seeking, and it is inappropriate.

A: I think that the notion of mastery and control is an unrealistic projection of the possibilities that are emerging, because for all of the advances that we make, we’re still in the midst of all this stuff. There’s one problem after another. It’s like you’re on a treadmill. You’re solving this, you’re solving that. It creates new problems. To me, the idea that we—whoever “we” is—are going to achieve some level of mastery over the environment, which is now increasingly complex and increasingly containing ourselves, it’s almost like we as a group, but we don’t act consciously like an individual. It’s all sorts of interplays and competitions and different varying possibilities that are in competition with one another. Look at all the noise that is associated with even these emergent possibilities in biotechnology. There’s argument, there’s disputation. It’s a process that is moving forward. To me, it feels very different from what we think of as mastery.

Q: What moral principles should be brought to bear, moving forward? You are a proponent of moving ahead full tilt, but what ethical and moral principles should be considered?

A: Let me step back in terms of the process. First of all, I think it’s unrealistic, if you just step back and look at what’s going on—the idea that we actually have the ability to say yes or no, this is going to happen or is not going to happen, is just silliness. This is going to move forward very, very aggressively. You can just see it in all of the energies that are being devoted towards furthering this process, although not necessarily acknowledging the powers that are involved in what is emerging. So it’s not a question about should we allow this to proceed or not. That’s a silly question, because obviously it’s going to move forward. To me, it’s about trying to do things and to guide the process and make it one that is in as much of alignment as we can with our values and the things that we cherish. There are many different answers to those questions from different groups of people and different individuals. Allowing, as well, acknowledging that there is profound turbulence and change that is occurring today, and best preparing ourselves to adjust and handle that change and realizing that values will change, that people will change. There was a lot of complaint about video games and about technology: Is this going to diminish our humanity in some sense? Who’s complaining about this stuff? It’s generally not the kids. If I look back at my great-grandparents and how they would respond to the world today, they wouldn’t be very happy with it. It would be, “It’s great, the things you have, but people don’t know their neighbors, families don’t stay together, you travel all over, people’s conversations at dinner are interrupted by a phone call”—all these sorts of things that are unfamiliar to them. And yet for me I think what a wonderful time to be alive! I wouldn’t want to go back to some previous simpler era with all of the positives and also all of the negatives associated with it. I think that if we look forward, our great-grandchildren are going to look in the same way at this period—to acknowledging that central to our humanity [are] the possibilities of change and redefining ourselves. It’s an acceptance, in many ways, of the inherent shifts and the difficulties that we will be dealing with, and just trying to do it in ways that are very positive, that feed the possibilities and the opportunities for people to develop their most human qualities, to realize themselves. I have a great deal of respect for individuals and the choices that they make. When they make choices about their families I think, by and large, they’re trying to do the right things. They’re the ones that suffer the consequences. In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we’re willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future. So, to me, it’s to avoid those sorts of things and to have some humility about our ability to see and to understand a time that we really can’t see very clearly, to allow these sorts of things to occur. To me, what we need is information. To act with wisdom doesn’t require going off and getting together a group of elders and saying how can we best handle this technology, because it comes from a place of ignorance. No one really understands what’s happening. What we need to do is—wisdom comes from knowledge that usually comes at a cost. It’s purchased, so not trying to stifle people’s ability to experiment and to try and do what they think will enhance our selves, in one way or another. By “enhance ourselves” I mean enhance our lives, make positive contributions to who we are and to how we interact with one another, because I think we will basically select what we find of value and will reject things that aren’t of value. So it protects ourselves in many ways. I think that putting that kind of stuff in place is the safest way ultimately to proceed; not to try and draw lines and say we should not cross this line because it feels so unfamiliar, so strange, so odd.

Q: You feel there is a moral responsibility to push ahead?

A: To be brave. We have possibilities before us that previous generations have only dreamed of. I’ve really dreamed of the idea of being able to alter human lifespan, of being able to prevent disease in profound ways, to enhance various qualities that we have. Who knows what will be of value and what won’t be? But I certainly feel that it would be a conceit for me to say that I know what we should do and what is of benefit for humanity as a whole and for the human enterprise. How crazy is that? My vision—and I think about these things all the time—and I actually think that the world that emerges fifty or a hundred years from now will be a place that I probably personally would be quite uncomfortable with because it’s quite unfamiliar. I would love to see it, but I don’t think it would be necessarily a place that would resonate with me in a variety of ways. I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago. You see older individuals who seem out of touch with new developments and you say, “Oh that would never happen with me! I can stay in tune. I can keep in contact with this emerging edge of novelty.” It’s very, very difficult, because the things that we’re familiar with, that resonate with us, are things that are often displaced. The biggest changes occur when a generation dies and a new generation begins to be the dominant one. So it’s very odd. I don’t understand. If you take something that could be the most profound change that could occur, which would be substantial extension of the human lifespan—say we were to double human lifespan—you would think this would be radical in that it would change virtually every institution, it could change the way we relate to one another, it would seem to have very profound consequences. Yet, at the same time, it would be very conservative, because the tastes of those people would probably not alter. And so people would want to hold back changes that would otherwise have occurred when they died. So how do you decide how it all plays out? I don’t think you can; not in advance. So, to me, it’s let’s see where it goes. Make the best choices that we can for real problems that are here and now and ones that we can see in the near-term future. But beyond that, let’s be open to creating possibilities for others to make choices about. That’s the way I see it. To me, I find it sad that so many people, in the face of such wondrous things that are occurring, feel afflicted by a vision that we are destroying the world in some sense, which is, to me, almost criminal; that we take all of this bounty around us and that we hold it as an affliction, when anybody in a prior era would say, “What wondrous things!” We should be happy. We should be enjoying that there is all this bounty. Somebody can take an iPod and have all the world’s music at their beck and call in an instant. What an amazing thing! That we can talk with people across the globe, that we actually can be cured of many, many diseases—these are very wonderful things, and that’s why things don’t change that much, because we take it all for granted. Now with that as a baseline, we say, “But there’s still bad things in the world.” How horrible is that? To me, it’s amazing that we can even envision a place at this point where many, many of the age-old afflictions of humankind are potentially manageable. What a step that is! Of course, it doesn’t come quickly.

Q: Would it trouble you if some of the technology that’s used to help Alzheimer’s patients was also used to enhance the memory of a child, for example, by a parent who wants a child to do better in school?

A: No. If we could enhance our memories, to me that superficially seems desirable. It’s not clear that it would be of as much value as we want, or that it’s as necessary, since we have all sorts of electronic devices that are essentially memory-enhancers, but they’re adjuncts to ourselves rather than alterations of our own biologies. Is it troubling that we carry around devices that expand our memories dramatically? No, not for me. Any time there is a reduction in some disease process, in some affliction which we can all support, the possibility exists of other enhancements. There aren’t sharp lines, in my view, between enhancement and therapy. A perfect example of that is therapeutic enhancements where if you were to improve your immune system so that your immune system was twice as good as it had been for any previous human being; that’s an enhancement, but it’s also therapeutic in that it would protect you from a variety of diseases. I think there are all sorts of blurred lines in that realm. So I would look at individual applications. In the abstract, one might be able to say it seems like this would be desirable or undesirable, but probably you won’t really know until certain individuals try them. And what is desirable for one person might be considered to be undesirable for another. I tend to leave things up to individuals’ choices, to individuals’ making choices about themselves.

Q: Is there a point at which you think it goes beyond choice and things go too far?

A: Right now, with the sort of possibilities of altering, for example, the genetics of an embryo, we’re making choices in a position of being a guardian for a potential future life. There would be some things that probably most of us would agree would be not only great to do, but probably should be done—maybe protection against certain kinds of diseases. There are other things that we would say, “This is beyond the pale,” something that would diminish or damage that future life in ways that we understand. Then I think there will be a whole bunch of stuff that well-intentioned people would have significant differences of opinion about whether it is of benefit or not. I would say, for those things, who’s going to make those choices? I would tend to leave those choices to the individuals, or the guardians, who will be most affected by what happens—and will gain us knowledge about, in fact, whether they are of value or whether they are damaging. So I would tend not to give much weight to the arguments that people make about “This may be good for the individual, but for society as a whole it will be a negative,” because those arguments can be perverted in all sorts of ways. They’re almost impossible to argue against, and they really reflect about our rather opaque visions of the future. So the idea that this is going to change the relationships of individuals with one another, if an individual is allowed to enhance him or herself, then what are the third-degree-removed consequences of that? I think those are relatively meaningless.

Q: Michael Sandel, again, argues against altering the relationship between parent and child, where the child becomes almost a consumer product.

A: I think that those kinds of arguments about what the nature of the relationship between parent and child will be because of the use of technology are very difficult, and I think they tend to be quite false. When people talk about having children as becoming a manufacturing process almost, I don’t think they have a clue about what it is to have a child. You can talk about what one is doing in conception, but there’s a nine-month pregnancy that’s going on. It’s a messy process. Having a child that is growing up and that is forming under your wing—this is not a manufacturing process. Parents sometimes hope that it could be more predictable, but I just see that as very unlikely. Or sometimes arguments are made that if there were cloning, then the cloned individual would not see him or herself as being unique. They would not see themselves as an individual. That’s just empty conjecture, in my view. We certainly have the examples of clones—those are identical twins. Some of them are very tight relationships; some of them fight like cats and dogs. Individual personal relationships and the way we deal with the world are so various. I think to make those kinds of assumptions is silliness, in many ways. I don’t think that should be a major factor in setting policy, because if in fact those are negatives, then we’ll find out soon enough. And we should do so while only very few people are making such choices. The problem is that those are easy to conjure up, those kinds of scenarios, whereas the scenario of people [finding] this of value to their lives, in subtle ways, in diverse ways—who responds emotionally to that argument? I think biologically we are very equipped to respond to the technology gone wild, to great threats. That’s why all the Hollywood movies are about some technology that has escaped and almost destroys us and then we get them back in the box, or we get it back in the box, but not quite, for the sequel. So that’s something we really respond to, and for obvious reasons. It’s really good for our survival in environments where there are clear and immediate dangers. But in terms of putting credence into some abstract vision of what society will be and what our roles will be and what the values of that will be, what our values there will be, and how we’ll hold that, I think, are very, very false.

An example of the kinds of choices that we might make in the future, and that we can make in the present, are screening embryos to make choices about various kinds of traits—personality, temperament—or simply matters of gender, choosing a boy or a girl. So many of the arguments about—and there are many that oppose the idea of choosing the gender of a child. They usually point out the gender imbalances that exist in China, or possibly in India, where there aren’t even high technologies being employed there; it’s simply a matter of basically ultrasound and abortion. And they are very driven by the natures of those societies and the way they devalue boys and girls. It turns out that, in the developed world, of those who make gender selection there is a very slight preponderance of girl babies that are chosen. But they are almost equal. I ask myself who is being injured if a parent, for whatever reason, does not want to have a baby boy, or does not want to have a baby girl—and there are going to be a variety of reasons for that. Is it the child that is being damaged by being the gender of choice of that parent? I don’t think so. If that parent wants to have a baby girl instead of a baby boy, the girl isn’t being damaged. If anything is occurring, the child of the unwanted gender is going to be mistreated, in some way or other, or treated as of less value. So I don’t see that as a problem. If we allow that to occur, and we begin to see larger social problems such as occur in some countries, then we can deal with that. This isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. It takes many, many years for these changes to occur. So that’s an example of a very profound choice. What about temperament and personality? Who is being injured if parents have a predilection for certain types of personality and temperament, if they would be more comfortable or think they really would prefer to have a child who is a little more outgoing, or who is more introverted, or who is a little brighter, or whatever those traits are—who sleeps through the night, a very selfish choice. If there were any risk involved, very few parents would do those sorts of choices. And if there is no risk involved, which there really wouldn’t be for embryo screening, then I think that it’s very unlikely that there’s going to be anyone that’s really damaged by that, other than on a philosophical level, that we’d feel that parents are making choices about their children.

Q: So what if someone actually selected a baby that’s going to sleep through the night or be a little smarter?

A: In my view, the idea that someone—a prospective parent—would make some choice about the possible temperament and personality of their future offspring—which is natural that they would do—in a way that they can relate to more fully, that they think will resonate with more—I don’t see that anyone is going to be damaged by that. I think that a lot of choices, especially by parents who are making a choice about a first-time child, probably this will be one of the many falsities about their relationship with their child that they will see, because they’re going to love their child anyway. To me, I don’t see it as anything that is going to be damaging to anyone. And so I would allow people to proceed with those sorts of choices. And if one begins to have problems that emerge, I think it would be great to monitor the results of those sorts of choices that people made and what the consequences are—for the child, for the family—and we can begin to see whether there are problems. But how can you say that you would only allow those choices to be made for certain types of disabilities? Is a child with cystic fibrosis any less lovable? Is a child with trisomy [Down syndrome] any less lovable? So then we’re led into the uncomfortable position of saying we’re going to draw this line. If it’s about temperament and personality, we don’t want to go there. But as long as it’s just getting rid of a child with some infirmity, of some sort of potential health problem, then we’re comfortable with that. To me, I find that troubling, because then it really is saying that, at some level, prospective future humans are expendable. We’re making that as a societal statement. And at other levels, for other kinds of traits, they’re really not. So I just don’t see anything very damaging about that. I ask myself about all of these technologies.

To me, the question is if this were happening to me, how would I feel about it? When people talk about parents making choices about temperaments and personalities of their children, often people are thinking, “If my parents had been choosing, would I exist? Would I be one of the chosen?” This is a reasonable thing to question. But if one already existed, and you were told, “You know, your parents made a choice that they wanted to have somebody that was kind of outgoing like you are and kind of bright,” or whatever it is, “and how do you feel about that?,” you’re already kind of the winner of the lottery. Are you going to say, “No, I feel diminished, because my personality was, in some sense, the product of choice?” I don’t think so. If you look at children that are adopted and you ask them when their adoptive parents told them how they were chosen and they said, “Oh, we loved you more than any other child! We saw you and you had this about you or that about you, and we chose you actively because we wanted you”—that’s much preferable to “We just picked you at random. You were there and so we took you in.” So, to me, it’s not clear at all that that would be viewed as a diminution by a child. In any event, it’s easy to conflate knowledge about ourselves with choice, because the genetics revolution is making it so that we will soon know about ourselves at a very early age whatever genetics has to tell us about ourselves. So children are going to have to deal with this in the future. To me, it’s kind of natural that we would want to use this information in ways that we consider to be advantageous for our kids. We do it after they’re growing up. Parents have designs for their children that may be out of synch with who they really are.

I feel that life is really a gift, but not from anyone in particular. I think it’s amazing, but there’s a process involved. I feel very grateful for the opportunities I have, for who I am, for what I am. I’m not religious. I have a sense of the spirituality of the world and of the process by which the universe is unfolding, but I don’t believe in a deity that has any interest in my personally, or that was involved in the creation of this universe. And so to me it’s almost awe-inspiring that such a thing exists, rather than the easy answer: Oh, well, something created it as it is. Then who created that something? I see no evidence of such a deity externally, and I still feel a great sense of awe and wonder about who we are and about our place in the universe.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Science and religion are sometimes at odds over the environment, but one prominent biologist is pleading for both to work together in order to protect the earth’s biodiversity — the many species of plants and animals that scientists say are at risk. E.O. Wilson is the author of a recent book, THE CREATION. He spoke with Bob Abernethy.

ABERNETHY: The thin layer of life covering the earth’s surface is made up of perhaps 10 million species of plants and animals, maybe more, and many scientists say those forms of life are in mortal peril. One of those sounding the alarm is biologist and retired Harvard University professor E.O. Wilson.

Dr. E.O. WILSON (Biologist and Author, THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): I want us to save the creation — not just care about it, but to save it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson is a broadly learned man with many honors, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his lifework — the study of ants.

Dr. WILSON: Here is a typical drawer of hundreds if not thousands of specimens.

ABERNETHY: His mission now is to protect all the Earth’s species. The greatest threat to biodiversity, says Wilson, is humankind’s appetite for more and more lumber and food and minerals and space to support six-and-a-half billion people, on the way to nine billion. Wilson says it is human over-consumption that’s the greatest threat to other species, and therefore a problem for us, too.

Dr. WILSON: We are threatened by the immense loss of future scientific knowledge, of future products that could enrich humanity and give us a higher quality of life. But the loss that I care about most is in our — in spiritual enrichment, in living in the magnificent original environment in which humanity was born.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says the natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.

Dr. WILSON: Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says scientists have identified 25 so-called hotspots — two-and-a-half percent of the earth’s land surface — in which nearly half of all the plant and animal species have been found. He wants the world to spend $30 billion to protect those ecosystems, in his words to “throw an umbrella over them.” The same species in other places might be endangered, but those in the hotspots would survive.

Wilson has long been a secular humanist, but he was raised a Southern Baptist in Alabama, and he understands religion’s power. So his new book, THE CREATION, is addressed to an imaginary Southern Baptist minister.

Dr. WILSON (From THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): Pastor, we need your help. The Creation is the glory of the earth. Let’s see if we can’t get together on saving it, because science and religion are the most powerful social forces on Earth. We could do it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson’s imaginary pastor could be Richard Land, a Southern Baptist minister who is the chief spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s a radio broadcaster and the author of his own book on the environment, THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God put man in charge under his headship. Human beings have dominion and are given dominion. But then that’s tempered by Genesis chapter 2, where man is put into the Garden to till it and to keep it. We’re not to just worship nature in its pristine form. We have a divinely mandated responsibility to both develop the earth for human betterment and to protect it and to guard it and keep it and exercise creation care.

ABERNETHY: Land accuses Wilson of being too concerned about wildlife and not enough about humanity.

Dr. LAND: He looks upon human beings as an alien species to the habitat of nature and that we are the ones that are destructive and that we have been a catastrophic event. Nature would have been far better off without human beings. As a Christian, we believe that God created the creation for humankind. So while we are to give respect to all life, we must treat human life with reverence. And there is in Christian theology a hierarchy of species, and there is a firebreak between human beings and the rest of creation. It is human beings that God gave a soul.

ABERNETHY: And protecting other species?

Dr. LAND: We certainly need to do all we can without causing grievous harm to human beings. There’s the difference — without causing grievous harm to human beings.

ABERNETHY: Land says millions of people, especially the very poor, would be devastated by some proposals for protecting the environment. Wilson insists that biodiversity could be protected without hurting humans.

Dr. WILSON: It would increase our standard of living if we did it sensibly with less material and energy consumption and conservation of the rest of life. We can actually increase the productivity of the world while saving all of the, or most of the remaining species.

Richard Land

ABERNETHY: Wilson sees a problem in what he says is the implication for some Christians of the belief that Christ is coming again.

Dr. WILSON: And that therefore there isn’t a lot of value in paying any attention to what we do to the Earth. We could go ahead and tear it all to hell and back, and I do consider that, frankly, as a gospel of despair, a view of humanity and our place on this Earth that is indefensible.

Dr. LAND: I personally have never met an evangelical Christian who believes that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a mythic figure. I believe that history will culminate in a radical second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to redeem his creation and humankind. But I specifically repudiate that you can draw from that that we can ignore the biblical admonitions and the biblical commands to exercise creation care. I think that is a false theology.

ABERNETHY: And Wilson’s idea of setting aside those 25 hotspots to protect their ecosystems?

Dr. LAND: As long as it can be done by not severely damaging the human beings who are in that eco-culture.

ABERNETHY: Land acknowledges that protecting the environment is becoming a high priority issue for many evangelicals.

Dr. LAND: Oh, I think that’s right. I think it’s a growing consensus among evangelicals and a growing consensus among Western civilization in general, and evangelical Christians are a part of that. The devil’s going to be in the details. It’s going to be in how do we address this?

Q: As briefly and as strongly as you can put it, what do you want all of us to do?

A: I want us to save the creation. Not just care about it, but save it. A large percentage of the Earth’s ecosystems and the species that live in them are endangered, and many will go extinct unless we take proper action.

Q: How serious is this threat of destruction? You have made some calculations and estimates about what percentage of existing species might be lost in some period of time.

A: It might be best to preface that by saying that the official list, which has been gone over species by species by experts, has something like 40 percent of the fresh water fish species in the world at some degree of risk, and about 25 percent, very roughly, of the frogs and other amphibians and reptiles and things of that sort, and 12 percent of the birds, and they are at sufficient risk so that most specialists on biological diversity would agree that as many as one-half of the species of plants and animals on Earth will be gone by the end of this century if we don’t do something.

Q: What if they disappear?

A: In very brief summary, what we will lose would have otherwise been incalculable value to future generations — well, to our own generation — in scientific knowledge, in potential new products, including pharmaceuticals that can be discovered in these species. We will lose enormous value and ecological services. It’s been estimated that the wild creatures of the world, the ecosystems they form, provide roughly $30 trillion worth of services scot-free to humanity every year. But to come quickly to the issues that I have most recently brought up, we will have severe spiritual loss, and we ought to also have for all generations to come, if we don’t do something about it, a bad conscience for having allowed the world biodiversity, and I will also call it “the Creation,” to disappear.

Q: You say severe spiritual loss. What do you mean by that?

A: The rest of life is important for humanity. It’s important not only for our day-to-day welfare and for our potential to manage a healthful life for humanity, but it is important for our psychological well-being. Psychologists have now established that probably due to the fact that humanity has lived in the midst of wild nature and came into being in wild nature’s environment that we are hard-wired to a very substantial degree to respond to it in particular wars, and to gain a sense of security, of depths of relationship, on occasion a sense of unlimited frontiers to explore, and the sense of our own worth. It’s a mix that, put together, produces spirituality.

Q: I can imagine someone saying that we have a growing population. We need to expand out into more and more farmland. From your perspective, that means destroying the natural habitat. Wouldn’t a lot of people think there was more practical value in growth and more economic prosperity than there would be — that that would be more important than protection of the species?

A: Well, let me put it this way, and with a metaphor, with a parable, so to speak. It would be a more immediate practical value to the French people to sell off all of the contents of the Louvre, take the money and put it into, well, whatever. But that would be very short-term, would it not, in terms of what would be yielded in money and income and perhaps comfort? But consider, too, it would be even greater practical value to burn it and use it for fuel. But, of course, the value of that would only last a matter of a few hours.

Q: What I’m trying to get at is the extent to which we are threatened by the loss of all these species. A: We are threatened by their loss.

Q: Why?

A: We are threatened by the immense loss that it entails of future scientific knowledge, future products that could enrich humanity and help stabilize our economies and give us a higher quality of life. We would be at severe loss, and you can measure it in dollars, of the ecosystem services, like the cleaning of water, the maintenance of water systems, pollination and so on that these wild systems provide for us. But the loss that I care about most is in spiritual enrichment, in living in this magnificent original environment in which humanity was born.

Q: What might be lost unless we act? What are the figures?

A: We know 1.8 million species of plants and animals and microorganisms today. We know them enough to classify them and identify them. The actual number is perhaps ten million, I think at least ten million, but when you include the microorganisms, it could go to a hundred million.

Q: We’re not conscious, most of us, of all these species on which you say we depend.

A: I don’t say it. It’s a fact that we depend on balanced, harmonious ecosystems for our lives.

Q: If we continue on the road we’re going, then, are we at risk of going hungry?

A: Let’s put it this way. Eventually yes, but I think the long-term loss would be the pauperization of the Earth. We’d get along, but it would just be a far poorer, less stable Earth. You know, I wish you would ask me the following question: Should we really be giving up fertile land and reducing our agricultural output worldwide and other resource output to save this species?

Q: Consider it asked.

A: Okay. In fact, the good news part of all of this big issue of the living environment and its conservation is that if we use our science, if we use common sense, we can actually increase the productivity of the world while saving all of the, or most of the remaining species. And we can do it in part by studying and making use of the resources of new food crops, new genes that can improve existing crop productivity, and furthermore the restoration for agricultural purposes of parts of the world that have become wasteland. But there’s another reason why this is such a foolish equation to draw, you know, between development versus conservation, and that is that we now know that something like one-half of the plant species of the world and perhaps 40 percent, very roughly, of the best known groups of animals, you know, like birds, mammals, and reptiles, are found on the land at least, and only about two and a half percent of the land surface. We call these the hotspots; the scientists have got them identified and mapped to some extent. We know how to save or at least throw an initial umbrella over a large part of the rest of life, including some of the most endangered species of ecosystems, by saving only two and a half percent of the land surface of the world. And if you throw in, in addition, chunks of the tropical forest wildernesses in the Congo and the Amazon and New Guinea — those wouldn’t be terribly expensive to acquire — you’re getting up to about 70 percent of the known species.

Q: What would it cost to preserve that much of the Earth’s surface?

A: The latter figure, one that covers as much as 70 percent, would cost, if ideally applied — and, of course, you know this, a lot of this has got to be political, economic planning and the like — would cost one payment of about $30 billion. Now $30 billion is a lot of money, you know, when you just say the word, but it’s worth pointing out that that’s only one part in a thousand of the world domestic product. In other words, humanity — and all of the countries in the world — has its annual domestic product combined of about $30 trillion, so that a $30 billion cost to save a very large part of the rest of life, one thousandth of that, now this seems to me, and I’ve never been rebutted on that, to be the best bargain ever offered humanity. Another way of putting the figures that have been worked out by teams of biologists and economists is that $30 billion would save, at least for a while, would throw an umbrella over some 70 percent of the known species living on the land.

Q: And what about people in this country? Suppose we took seriously what you propose. Would it require that we lower our standard of living, and if so, how much?

A: It would increase our standard of living if we did it sensibly. It would mean that we would now include in our programs of scientific and technological advance the methods to make far better use of already cultivated land, other natural resources that we have of alternative energy sources, all those things, you know, that we now are waking up to as crucial to our future, quite apart from the living environment from the creation. We move in that direction, and then include in it the goal to take through with us, through this bottleneck that we’re in right now of overpopulation and over-consumption, gross consumption, to take through as much of the rest of life and creation as we can until we can get on better footing economically and environmentally. Then this would be worth tremendous amount of effort on our part as a country and the world at large.

Q: How much would population growth have to be reduced in order to accomplish what you want?

A: You know, the question is moot, because we already know that the population is slowing down; growth is slowing down fast. Right now we are at a point of somewhere around an average worldwide of three children per woman, fertility worldwide. And that is down to about half of what it was 40 years ago or so. It turns out that women get a little more freedom, a little more security, more independence, and more control over their own reproduction virtually everywhere in the world, they reduce the number of children they have. They want a small number of quality children. It’s as simple as that. So, it’s been estimated that due to this downward trend of fertility, we will peak worldwide at a population of somewhere around 9 billion, and that’s, say, roughly 40 percent more than are on the earth today. That’s manageable.

Q: What about the implications for government power? The kinds of things that would have to be done, it seems, require a certain amount of coercion on the part of the state, no?

A: No, sir. In a free, capitalist, competitive democracy like the United States, it only requires markets, some boosting markets, some kind of encouragement, and that can come about by two means. One, and foremost, is public awareness. As the public becomes better informed about what the world and America’s environmental problems are, and therefore can see things in personal, human self-interest, then they will begin to ask questions of how we can accomplish this. And when they see the role that biodiversity plays in the stability of the world and how valuable it can be in every respect to us now and the future generations, then we will get a bottom-up pulse of opinion that can push it, expressed in the marketplace, expressed in the polls and voting booths. The other way is — and this has to come about as part of the political process — we should put subsidies on those kinds of scientific and technological advances. We have all kinds of subsidies already; most of them are to pursue what often are ruinous environmental practices, you know, such as the fisheries, at least in the past. And now we need to be able to encourage industry and technological innovators to move in the direction of producing a better world with material and energy consumption and conservation of the rest of life.

Q: I’d like to take you through some of what I imagine to be the objections of a Southern Baptist pastor, the kind of person to whom you have addressed your book. You’re speaking from the point of view of someone who was long ago convinced that evolution and natural selection are the way we all got to be the way we are. I can imagine someone who would say Genesis doesn’t say that. Genesis says God created everything in six days.

A: That’s precisely why I wrote THE CREATION. I put my cards face up on the table as a biologist who indeed has spent his life working on evolution and is convinced of its reality. But then, having expressed my own personal beliefs very frankly, including my secularist interpretation of the position of humanity and the universe, I offer a hand of friendship. That’s something I don’t think any natural scientist of my acquaintance has ever done, particularly when they start arguing about these issues. And that’s why I address the Southern Baptist pastor. He stands in for the evangelicals, who stand in for religious believers who have that moral view, generally: Pastor, we need your help, and it doesn’t matter what either one of us, or any of us, believe about how it got there. The creation is there. It’s the glory of the Earth. It’s the treasure house and the responsibility of humanity. Let’s see if we can’t get together on saving it as common ground in a good American tradition, and if we did, because science and religion are the most powerful social forces on Earth, we could do it. It would be a wonderful way to get together and put the best of what we have, your commitment, your religious passion, your beliefs put to a good purpose, and the scientists’ passion, based on secular knowledge, scientific knowledge — I mean, that’s what we do. That’s our business is to find out all these facts, put them together, and solve the problem.

Q: There are people who claim that evolution is not yet proven.

A: I think they’re wrong. I think the evidence is overwhelming. But that said, I don’t think that should be a serious stumbling block even in terms of the cooperation of religious [communities] and environmentalists and scientific researchers at all, because we can find, I think, common ground without settling that argument. I want to put aside the culture wars. I want to call a truce on the culture wars. Or if they continue to be conducted, I’d like to have them conduct this on a different battlefield. I want to see these differences in worldview acknowledged but then put aside, or at least that the culture wars, as they’ve been conducted recently, occur on a different battlefield. It can be simultaneously, but I want to join on another terrain that in the long-term I believe will prove to be more important for humanity to solve this other big problem.

Q: Some people say history is going to come to an end very soon. The end times are approaching, perhaps within our lifetime, so why do we have to worry about all these species? We’ve got better things to think about.

A: On the matter of end time, I know a lot of people believe in it, especially within the evangelical movement. But it comes down to really a matter of time, doesn’t it? There are some who believe that it is upon us, that it will occur in our lifetimes, it could occur within a few weeks, and so on. But I think the majority of Christians and possibly a majority of evangelicals don’t believe that it’s coming that quickly. If you accept it — as a secularist I wouldn’t, but let’s say you accept it, that it’s coming. Then it really is a matter of how long it is off. Even if it’s a short time off, I believe that the Bible was quite plain, and that common sense makes it compelling, and that everything that is human that we feel as human should make it a precept of our morality that we take care of the creation. An evangelical leader, I think it was Billy Graham, but certainly one of that fame and caliber, said not long ago that just because we’re stewards of the Earth doesn’t mean that we should be trashing it.

Q: There’s a line in your book: “Pastor, tell me this is not true.” You were referring to this idea that we don’t have to take care of the Earth because it’s all going to end very soon, and you said that was a gospel of cruelty and despair.

A: A very small majority of Christians, and maybe a small majority even among the born-again Christians, believe that the Rapture, that is, the bodiless asset of those born again, saved by the Redeemer, will occur very quickly, very soon, in our lifetime, and that therefore there isn’t a lot of value in paying any attention to what we do to the Earth. We could go ahead and tear it all to hell and back and make whatever use of it we want, because it’s been given to us sort of like a Christmas present to be unwrapped and used by the Creator. I do consider that, frankly, as a gospel of despair, of pessimism, a view of humanity and our place on this Earth that is indefensible.

Q: And some people might say don’t worry too much about it. Human beings are resourceful. Some of them are brilliant, and human genius will get us out of this.

A: Yes. I’ve faced the argument many times. That comes from the other extreme. Now we’re departing from the religious as such, and now we’re going over to what can be called techno-mania, and that is an unlimited faith in human potential to solve our problems, including of our own making. No matter how serious they are, we’ve always been ingenious. We’ve always figured out some way of replacing things we threw away, of restoring things we destroyed, of finding new sources of strength and energy. So we’ll just rely on human genius, we’ll rely on science, and we’ll rely on technology to pull us out, no matter how badly we screw up. So it’s okay to just plow full ahead and have total faith in humanity’s ability to adapt to all changing conditions. You might say that’s a kind of secularist extremism way at the opposite side of the pole of those in the evangelical movement who say it doesn’t matter what we do to the Earth, we will be provided for by God.

Q: Do you think human genius could solve it?

A: Well, let me put it this way. Can human genius solve all problems of our own making as we are totally reckless about how we handle our own environment? I think there are lots of situations that could be imagined in which no amount of human genius can solve the problems. If you chose to take a nose dive off a ten-story building, we can’t do anything for you. We’re just not that brilliant.

Q: Back to the imagined Southern Baptist pastor. What arguments would you put to him that you would want him to answer?

A: I think straight talk. In fact, what I’ve done in THE CREATION is to say, and the key to this is respect, deference, and a willingness to ask for help from the secularists, particularly the secular- based scientists and environmentalists, and to say, particularly in my case I could say I know the evangelical culture. I know the Bible. There’s a lot for me to learn. I’d like to learn more. I’d like to learn more about the worldview of Judeo-Christianity and particularly evangelicalism. But now I’d like to take you on a tour through my world and tell you how I see modern biology, where it is today, where it’s going, what the problems are that we’ve revealed concerning the environment and the like. So that’s the first thing I say to my new friend, the Southern Baptist pastor, and then I say, “You know, I’m not in a position to tell you this, but I would be so heartened if you agreed that there’s common ground and that somehow what I could lay before you, and my colleagues, you know, in science and environmental work — we lay before you something that you see as worthy of your ministry.”

Q: Isn’t the idea of stewardship strong in the Bible? Can it ever be interpreted to mean that God put us in charge and we can do anything we want with these lesser forms of life? And there is also plenty that says we have a responsibility to look after what God created.

A: Well, I’m not a biblical scholar. But I’ve read a lot in the Bible, and I grew up with it, and the feeling that I had from the very beginning was that the Bible preaches stewardship, that is, gives us responsibility. It gives us the rule of the Earth, the dominion of the Earth, but it also gives us responsibility, and it does not tell us really to transform everything into a cornfield, you know, to make everything just produce more people and more products to feed more people. There’s nothing in the Bible there that I’m aware of — I’m willing to stand corrected — but I go by Genesis and this magnificent command, I think it was on the fourth day of creation: “Let the waters be filled with countless living creatures, and let the birds fly above the Earth beneath the vault of the sky.”

Q: In one of your books it was widely interpreted that you were saying our behavior and everything about our lives was determined by our genes, much more than people at the time wanted to hear. You were the center of a lot of controversy, which eventually died down. But where do you stand now on that, on the extent to which we are the creatures of our genes and, on the other hand, we are shaped by our environment and by free will?

A: It’s a tough question to answer today, even though we know a great deal more about the relation between heredity and environment in shaping the human character, and by that I mean not just our individual traits as human beings, but the entire panoply of human nature. Thirty years ago, I published a book called SOCIOBIOLOGY and proposed that there is such a thing as human nature and that a lot of what we tend to do, what can be called instincts in humans, has a biological basis. The idea was very controversial. In fact, it was very substantially attacked. At that time, what was called a blank slate view of the brain was in almost complete control of the academic world, of social sciences. Marxists — that was their prayer book, the blank slate, because they believed at that time that humanity was entirely the product of culture and environment and that the brain came into existence, that is, in each human a blank slate on which experience inscribed our character. We know that’s not true now. The blank slate view disappeared rather quickly in the face of scientific evidence. But that evidence did not lead to the view of human beings as genetic automatons, you know, all determined and not in control of our own destiny. No, it led to something else. It led to a picture, and it’s getting clearer all the time, of humans as having a true nature that we all share, and that these are expressed in our emotions, and that they make some things easier for us to learn and other things very hard to learn. They make it certain that we’ll have strong emotions in different stages of our lives that make it almost compelling to do one thing as opposed to another. But it gives us enormous freedom in the way we do that and in the way we can control or enhance those traits that are hard-wired into our brain. I think that’s the basic idea today concerning the nature of human nature.

Q: Is one of the things that is hard-wired into us the idea that God exists?

A: Yes. Maybe not the Judeo-Christian God, but the idea that there are deities, there are supernatural forces in more elementary societies. These are sometimes just the spirits of the ancestors that are with us and wandering about and helping guide us, but the idea of supernatural guidance and empowerment of our tribe — notice tribe, not all of humanity, but particularly the group we belong to — I believe is hard-wired in us.

Q: Is there hard-wiring for the idea of there being something more than the material world?

A: Yes.

Q: Not just for the tribe but for all –

A: Yep.

Q: — for all human beings, something more that deep down we have a yearning for, experience of, and contact with?

A: I think that one of the deepest of human qualities hard-wired in the brain, if you wish, is the intense desire to belong to a group that shares important parts of its culture, and shares the sense of purpose larger than individual self, and shares, in the most cases it would be, a supernatural approbation and guidance and favor. In the case of secularists, we have the same types of grouping, culture formation, but now it comes and gets its expression as great goals of humanitarianism, a desire to learn as much about the universe as possible. But whatever form it takes, it seems to be fundamental to human beings.

Q: Can a person be both a good scientist and a person of religious faith?

A: Absolutely. I think that a person who is fundamentalist, to the extent of being a biblical literalist — you know, very strict interpretation of the actual words as sacred script and who denies that evolution ever occurred — is going to have trouble doing science in certain broad areas of biology. But otherwise I would say for those who accept that humanity came about by evolution, and that would include members of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, and most denominations, it is quite possible to have all the accoutrements of spirituality and believe in a deity.

Q: As a secular humanist, do you think everything can or will be explained by science?

A: No.

Q: Do you think that science can tell us everything there is to know about living?

A: I believe that science will, in the end — and remember science is not some body of entities that exists apart from humanity or from other belief systems; science is simply that body of knowledge from which we have gained some confidence by testing, by transparency, by logical connections to other bodies of science; [it] is the most democratic of all human activities, and it is one that’s widely shared, so let’s be clear on what science is. I would say that the scientific knowledge expanding still, almost at exponential rate, has already covered and given different explanations, and different world views apply, to a large part of what religion earlier appropriated to itself. But will science explain everything? No. We’re not that smart. Even with supercomputers, we’re not going to explain everything. There’s just too much complicated detail out there. We may get finally our unified theory of physics. We may come to understand in substantial detail how almost every species on Earth came into being and so on. But that’s still far from everything.

Q: Religious people often remind us that there are things like beauty and our appreciation of beauty. There are things like moral law. There are things like the religious impulse itself. I think a lot of people would argue that these are things science can never explain, because they are part of a spiritual reality that science doesn’t deal with.

A: I think science will explain a lot, particularly when neuroscience really reaches maturity as a science. But that does not degrade the matter whatsoever. If you explain the total physics of a violin, and you go to explain why the brain responds and what parts of it are responding and perhaps even some reasons, in terms of human survivability, we consider a particular piece of music beautiful, it doesn’t degrade the beauty of it. I think it enhances it, and that’s where science and the humanities and perhaps religion eventually will converge.

Q: Many people think it very important that there is a God who is separate from us, who makes his presence something we can experience in our daily lives, and that experience is of enormous value to people. The idea is that there is a spiritual realm to reality that is separate from the material. Do you acknowledge that?

A: Let me put it this way. I’m a good scientist. I’m not a hundred percent sure about anything, and I do have a kind of driving faith that humanity, having seized Promethean fire, so to speak, and found out how to understand the universe, will keep going until we will be able to explain things like the origin and the mechanics of spirituality. But that’s just a belief that I have, based on the track record of science. I do not believe, but this is a personal belief, that there is any sort of intercession, via divinity or other supernatural force, on human feeling, even the most exalting human feeling. But, as I said to my pastor, you could be wrong. I could be wrong. We may both be partly right.