LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Ray Kurzweil may not be a household name, but the blind know who he is. He invented the first reading machine and then reduced its size to a hand-held gadget. Kurzweil will be remembered more as a man on a mission to tell the world what life will be like in the age of technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates said he is the best in the world at predicting the future, and what a world he predicts.

RAY KURZWEIL: This is a design of a robotic red blood cell. We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called “The Singularity Is Near,” predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.

KURZWEIL: What I am predicting is that we will have machines—we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.

SEVERSON: Even if nonbiological or artificial intelligence created in places like MIT is not as close to “singularity” or matching human intelligence, as Kurzweil believes, it’s close enough that scientists and ethicists are now saying we need to take a serious look at its ramifications. Professor Christian Brugger is a bioethicist at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Brugger disagrees with Kurzweil that humans can ever come close to perfection with technology.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN BRUGGER (Saint. John Vianney Theological Seminary): I don’t think that the technology is the problem. What I have concerns about is the philosophy that stands behind it, the idea that somehow we are going to be able to overcome human limitation or we’re going to overcome death.

SEVERSON: What troubles Brugger the most is the notion that technology will one day replace God.

BRUGGER: If we start to think about technology as a kind of savior, is it going to overcome our misguided ambitions? Is it going to overcome those kinds of prejudices that cause us to hate our neighbor? To many of us who follow a religion, we’d say that God would help us to overcome those things.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil argues that it’s human nature for mankind to utilize technology to overcome human limitations.

KURZWEIL: We are the species that does change ourselves. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay with the limits of our biology. If you want to speak in religious terms you can say that’s what God intended us to do.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil bases his predictions on what he calls the exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

KURZWEIL: Informational technology is growing exponentially, not linearly. Our intuition says it grows like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—thirty steps later you’re at 30. The reality is that it grows 2, 4, 8, 16, and 30 steps later you are at billion.

(giving a speech): When I was a student at MIT, I went there because it was so advanced at that time it actually had a computer, and it costs tens of millions of dollars. It took up half a building. The computer that I carry around and that we all carry around is a million times less expensive. It’s a thousand times more powerful.

SEVERSON: John Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and engineering and director of the Brown University Institute for Brain Science. He says his work has not progressed exponentially. But in only 10 years he’s been able to implant sensors in the brains of paralyzed patients enabling them to operate a computer, type, run a robotic limb simply by thinking, sending out brain signals.

PROFESSOR JOHN DONOGHUE: The value of the technology is first for people who are severely paralyzed. The first step is to give them any control at all. They can’t do anything without help from someone else. People want and feel some sense of pride in taking care of themselves so anything we can restore is a great step.

SEVERSON: Neuroscience has yielded other life altering advances. For instance, there are now over 75,000 Parkinson patients worldwide who’ve had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains. Doctors say the operation significantly reduces tremors and allows patients to rely less on medications.

KURZWEIL: By the way, nobody is picketing, protesting, oh, people putting computers in their brains—that that is somehow unnatural or defies the way things should be.

SEVERSON: Bioethicist Brugger worries that science will soon cross the line to where brain implants will not simply heal patients, but enhance their ability to think and compete.

BRUGGER: If we move in this direction of radical human enhancement, are we going to develop those who are and those who aren’t? The enhanced and the unenhanced? I mean, Lord, we can’t even find the money to get everyone braces who needs braces.

KURZWEIL: When the technologies are only affordable by the rich they actually don’t work very well. Consider mobile phones. Fifteen years ago somebody took out a mobile phone in the movie. That was a signal this person is very powerful and wealthy, and they didn’t work very well. Now 5 billion people out of 6 billion have mobile phones, and they actually work pretty well.

COLIN ANGLE (CEO of iRobot): A lot of people worry about one day there will be a knock on the door, and there will be a robot, and you would say where did that come from? And I will tell you that the future is going to be much stranger.

SEVERSON: Colin Angle is the cofounder and CEO of iRobot, better known as the creator of the Roomba, the floor cleaning robot or the PackBot robot used to disarm roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon to be released—robots that can keep track of grandma and remind her when it’s time to take her meds.

ANGLE: We call it a physical avatar, and so that these robots would allow a doctor to visit a patient in their own home without ever having to leave his doctor office. These robots are meant to be surrogates for people, so the personality of the doctor will be the personality of the robot.

BRUGGER: I think that iRobots are wonderful, if they can do the vacuuming for me so I can read a good book. I’m happy with that. But iRobots are not my wife, and they are not my children. They are not even an animal.

SEVERSON: Angle doesn’t believe robots will ever replace humans, but he says notwithstanding the science fiction stories of robots run amok, society needs them.

ANGLE: Throughout history there are many different situations where technology exists and can be used for good or evil, and I think that as robots become more capable we need to be careful about using robots to help society.

DONOGHUE: The classic scary story is “The Matrix,” of course, where you plug in and you live in this other reality.

SEVERSON: The reality where computers take over the world:

(from the movie “The Matrix”): “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” “AI? You mean artificial intelligence?” “A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.”

SEVERSON: Kurzweil himself worries about technology falling into the wrong hands.

KURZWEIL: The same technologies that are being used to reprogram biology away from heart disease and cancer, presumably good things, could be deployed by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more destructive, and that’s actually a specter that exists right now.

SEVERSON: He says he’s working with the military to develop a system to detect rogue viruses, something like the virus protection found in today’s computer software. But he sees the good society can gain from artificial intelligence far outweighing the bad.

KURZWEIL: That was the family religion. It was personalized: You, Ray, can find the ideas that will change the world.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has patented over two dozen inventions, including the first music synthesizer, which he sold to Stevie Wonder. President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and few have more faith in technology than Ray Kurzweil.

KURZWEIL: Computers are already better than humans at logical thinking. It is our emotional intelligence, the ability to be funny, to get the joke—that is the cutting edge of human intelligence. That’s the most sophisticated, complicated thing we do, and that’s exactly the heart of my prediction that these computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system.

BRUGGER: I don’t think that will ever be reached because now we are dealing in the realm of the spirit. If the entire realm of the spirit that has been spoken about in the history of poetry and literature and philosophy and theology is reducible to electrical synapse, then we can reproduce it eventually in a machine, because electricity is at the basis of the machine. I deny that premise. I think that there is more to human beings than reducible to measurable stimuli, and in that regard I don’t think that machines are ever going to be able to be human.

SEVERSON: Undaunted by his critics and skeptics, Kurzweil is so convinced that artificial intelligence will one day enable man to live forever he is doing everything he can to be around when it happens.

SONYA KURZWEIL (making a toast): Well, here’s to living forever. That’s not just a salutation in our family.

KURZWEIL: I want to live indefinitely, and actually I think we all do. People say, oh, I don’t want to live forever, 100 would be great. When they get to 100, they don’t want to die tomorrow.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil is so determined to live “indefinitely.” He takes as many as 200 supplements each day, says this regimen made it possible to reverse both his diabetes and his age. His most recent full-blown checkup results show he has the body and mind of a 40-year-old. Kurzweil is 62 and striving for immortality.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Boston.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: A bittersweet moment for members of the Havasupai tribe, retrieving blood samples they gave to Arizona State University (ASU) 20 years ago.

CARLETTA TILOUSI: We felt very strongly that blood samples are sacred to all Native Americans, a major part of our spiritual, cultural, and religious identity. We are going to take them back down to Supai Canyon where they can finally rest in peace.

SEVERSON: Supai Village is actually at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where about 600 Havasupai continue to weave baskets and farm and struggle against the diabetes that has afflicted so many of their tribe.

REX TILOUSI: I began to see the sickness come to my elders. Some of my elders didn’t have no legs. They were helpless.

SEVERSON: So the Havasupai tribe approached a scientist at ASU who took blood samples of about 200 tribal members.

DANNY WESCOGAME: Thirty-two people have passed on since this whole thing began, and it hurts, hurts a lot to me.

SEVERSON: Scientists at ASU could not find the link to congenital diabetes, but author Rebecca Skloot says they didn’t stop there.

REBECCA SKLOOT: Those samples were later used without the tribe’s knowledge for research into schizophrenia, alcoholism, the effects of intermarriage, and a lot of the stuff was stuff that they either found to be stigmatizing or that actually went against some of their own belief systems.

SEVERSON: The Havasupai received a cash settlement in a rare win for cell donors. There are hundreds of millions of bio samples, such as blood and tissue stored in bio banks in this country. But the answers to the tough religion and ethics questions about informed consent and compensation haven’t kept up with the science. Bioethicist Jonathan Moreno says even the science-fiction writers underestimated the state of the art as it is today.

PROFESSOR JONATHAN MORENO (University of Pennsylvania): You know, our science-fiction writers anticipated, like H.G. Wells at the end of “War of the Worlds,” the importance of bacteria in the late nineteenth century. People were really taken by that. The science-fiction writers didn’t anticipate that our cells themselves would be the subject of experiments.

Henrietta Lacks

SEVERSON: And nowhere is there a better example of the importance of human cells than those cancer cells taken by doctors in 1951 from Henrietta Lacks as she lay dying of cervical cancer.

MORENO: They are the most prolific cells. Nobody knows exactly why. They have some characteristics that haven’t been identified, but they don’t seem to age in every passage. So far as we know those cells really are immortal.

SKLOOT: Henrietta’s cells grew sort of unlike anything anyone had seen. They doubled their numbers every 24 hours.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Skloot wrote the best-selling book called “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” She says Henrietta’s cells, also known as Hela cells, put end to end would wrap around the earth three times and weigh more than 50 million metric tons. But what’s most amazing is their contribution to medical science.

SKLOOT: They have literally saved millions of lives, and pretty much everybody out there has benefited in some way from research on her cells. They were used to develop the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Her cells were the first ever cloned.

SEVERSON: Henrietta’s cells also made many scientists and entrepreneurs rich.

SKLOOT: Her family to this day lives in quite a bit of poverty. They can’t afford health insurance so, you know, the scientists would come to get samples from the family and, you know, her sons would say things like, “If our mother was so important to medicine, why can’t we go to the doctor?”

Maggie Little

SEVERSON: Maggie Little, director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, says the courts almost never side with individuals whose bio samples become commercially profitable.

MAGGIE LITTLE (Kennedy Institute of Ethics): In general, when courts have looked at somebody who gave a tissue sample, and the pharmaceutical company later did find a commercial application for it, the courts ruled that the individual who gave the sample didn’t have any intellectual property rights or any claim to profit-sharing.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Skloot spent 10 years researching and writing her book and eventually won the trust of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who didn’t find out about her mom’s amazing cells until researchers asked the family for samples 25 years after Henrietta died.

SKLOOT: Deborah was a very deeply religious woman, and she very much believed her mother’s soul was alive in these cells, and so the scientists would come to the house and take samples, and she would say things like, you know, “Can my mother rest in peace if you’re sending these bits of her up to the moon and injecting them with chemicals? Can she feel that somewhere? Does she then get sick in the afterlife?”

SEVERSON: She became so distraught worrying about her mother Deborah’s cousin, Gary, offered to perform a kind of exorcism.

The Lacks family

SKLOOT: He just stood up and put his hands on her head and started singing and praying and, you know, saying, “Lord, you’ve got to take the burden of the cells from this woman. She can’t take it anymore. It was an enormous relief for her.

SEVERSON: Today there are laws requiring consent from people like Henrietta Lacks, but they apply only to research that is federally funded, and there aren’t clear laws regarding stored tissues. But Maggie Little says if someone’s cells are used for specific research end up being profitable, then the donor should be compensated.

LITTLE: Sometimes individuals have biologies that are especially interesting, and their version of a cancer cell or their version of a liver cell is of enormous commercial value, and then it does seem to me that fairness indicates a little bit of profit-sharing.

SEVERSON: And ethicists like Jonathan Moreno feel that privacy and confidentiality are absolutely essential to protect those who do give.

MORENO: If you take some of my tissues, my cells, and do genetic analysis, you’re learning not just about me, but in some measure at least you’re learning about my relatives. So we have to be very sensitive to the prospects of stigmatization.

SEVERSON: As for informed consent and defining exactly what the researcher is looking for:

MORENO: What drives a scientist is the unexpected, and that’s what you can’t capture in informed consent. Probably the better model is the idea that really if my cells are being taken as part of my therapy, and they might be useful in science, I should really gift them. They should—I should give them away to the scientific community so that they can be used productively.

SEVERSON: Deborah might have argued that the family should have received some remuneration for Henrietta’s fertile cells, but she finally came to terms with her mom’s legacy.

SKLOOT: She really came to believe that Henrietta was chosen as an angel to live on in these cells and take care of people and, you know, if you look at the Bible it says the Lord—believers will be granted immortal life, and you never know what form they’ll come back in.

SEVERSON: As for the Havasupai, they’ve taken their sacred blood samples back down to the canyon, where the tribe says they can rest in peace.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Lucky Severson in Phoenix, Arizona.

Originally broadcast September 4, 2009

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!

Mike Godfrey

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

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: No, ignorance for me is not bliss.

Sarah Crosby-Helms

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.

Stem cells are the master cells of the human body. They are the seeds for our tissues. They come in two varieties. They are pluripotent, which means they can make any tissue in the body, and the classical pluripotent stem cell is the embryonic stem cell which comes from the earliest human embryos. There are also stem cells in our adult tissues, so called adult stem cells, or better somatic stem cells, stem cells of the body, and I think the analogy to plants is a good one. We are talking about the seeds for our tissues, so if our skin is like a lawn of grass, the stem cells of the skin are the grass seeds.

Embryonic or pluripotent stem cells are different from adult stem cells. They teach us different things. If we want to understand the earliest stages of human development, how we lay down all the different tissues, then we are best to study these early embryonic or pluripotent stem cells. If we are just interested in the skin, for instance, then we study the skin stem cell. So it’s not one is better than the other, it’s that they teach us very different things. My laboratory studies both side by side. We study embryonic stem cells as well as the adult stem cell for the blood-forming system, so called hematopoietic stem cells. We found that actually studying both types side by side gives us a much greater insight into their functions.

The research is answering very fundamental questions, first of all, but the promise is that one day we might learn to deliver stem cells as curative therapies. For now we can use stem cells to treat diseases of the blood. So if a child has a genetic disease or leukemia or lymphoma, we might use a blood stem cell typically taken from a healthy sibling to try to cure that child’s disease. But there are many diseases that we can’t approach yet with stem cells, other diseases of the blood that aren’t easily treated by bone marrow transplant, diseases of other organ systems like diabetes, or even in adults diseases of the degenerating brain. We believe that stem cells offer a new approach. It gives us a new way of organizing our thinking about the way tissues form and the way tissues could be affected by disease. Stem cells are part of what we call regenerative medicine, because stem cells are involved in the natural repair and regeneration of our tissues. They teach us enormous amount about the disease process, but they give us this possibility for regenerating tissues, and that’s why they are of such tremendous scientific importance, but also potential medical value in the future.

Under the last administration we were operating under a very restrictive policy, so in 2001 President Bush allowed funding for a very small number of embryonic stem cell lines, and over the last decade over 1,000 new lines have been created. The new Obama policy opens up the possibility for federally funded researchers to use all of those lines. So you can imagine it creates a much greater opportunity for scientists to use the many hundreds of lines that have been generated that model specific human diseases, lines that have been made under pristine medical conditions. Those are all valuable, but until the new policy they haven’t been accessible to us who are working under federal funding.

With many governmental policies, the devil is in the details. So the [Obama] policy was announced in March of 2009. In July of 2009, the National Institutes of Health implemented the policy with a very exhaustive new set of guidelines, and in December they’ve approved their first 13 lines. Now our lines from Children’s Hospital were 11 of the first 13, which is very exciting. But now it’s a complicated policy. We have only one line that we were able to use under the old policy that’s been accepted under the new policy, and there’s a pipeline of hundreds of lines waiting for approval. So the policy is in place, but it’s going to take months, maybe a year of more, to implement it. So there’s still a certain delay and frustration.

Embryonic stem cells come from human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF). One in six couples in our society can’t have children. They are infertile, and they will often turn to in vitro reproductive assistance in a very sincere desire to have their own family. So the egg and the sperm can be brought together in a petri dish. Now in order to make it safer for the woman, this is done in a way that many embryos are created and then frozen away. Then the couple may choose to have one, two, and sometimes three children, and the remaining embryos are left behind. In the past, couples had the chance to discard those as medical waste or to donate them to research, and some chose to donate them for the creation of these embryonic stem cell lines. Now a small number of these embryos can be adopted by other couples, but we are talking about hundreds of thousands of embryos throughout the country, and they are never going to become babies. Now there is an ethical debate about the value, and it essentially pits the societal interest in directing research in the cure of diseases against the moral status of this early human embryo.

Human embryonic stem cells are derived from this earliest stage of human development. Now we are talking about the first three or four days after conception, when the human embryo is a tiny ball of cells, between 50 and 200 cells. It’s a speck smaller than a period at the end of a sentence. You need a microscope to see it. There’s no structure, there’s no body parts. In fact, there’s not even a single cell there that persists in our bodies. They’re stem cells that will give rise to all the tissues. There’s no nerve cells, there’s no blood cells, and it’s a very, very primitive structure that in more than half the cases doesn’t even implant productively in the uterus. So scientists look upon these as extremely valuable cells, tissues, not as people. But the debate rages on because there are some in our society who want to say that the human person begins at the point of conception and therefore should be free from experimentation. This particular view, that life begins at conception, is a historical feature that can be traced to Pope Pius IX in the late 1800s. There are certain other religious groups, evangelical Christians, that tend to hold to this very, very strict notion, life begins at conception. From a scientific point of view I find this curious, because life is everlasting. All cells are alive. The sperm is a live cell, the egg is a live cell. All life has to derive from preexisting life, and then, of course,the life of a cell is very different from the life of a person. When I’m a physician thinking about a patient’s death I don’t think about their cells dying. I think about their coordinated, integrated physiologies stopping. Their brain dies, their heart stops. We define brain death as a way independent of the death of a body. In fact, the body can be sustained in brain dead individuals on a respirator to help with breathing, make sure that the heart continues to pump. This is a very different concept than saying that a cell is alive. But one looks at it from a practical point of view. One actually dissects the very nature of cells relative to the nature and needs of human beings, of persons, persons with disease, persons with needs that call on us in a much greater sense than cells would call on us. I think that we can make those distinctions.

We do believe that there is medical value in creating cells, sometimes in the form of embryos that are matched to individuals. That gives us an enormous ability to take a person’s cells and make them into a stem cell. Now it’s been disparaged as somehow creating human life. The fact is, once again, the cells are all living. We are simply changing the nature of one cell into another for research purposes. Some of the heat around this debate of creating life has really dissipated because of this new way of making pluripotent stem cells which we call now induced pluripotency. So I can now start with skin cells or blood cells and add a few genes. These are genes that are resident in embryonic stem cells that give them this special ability to make any tissue. By simply transferring those genes from embryonic stem cells into skin tissue or blood tissue, we turn them back into their embryonic state. This gives us the opportunity to make stem cells from any patient That way we can study their disease, and we can make cells that are the patient’s own cells so they would not be rejected, should we would want to or need to transplant them back for a type of therapy. It does address some of the ethical challenges, and it gives us enormous new opportunities to study research tools and to develop new therapies.

We need both embryonic as well as adult stem cells in research. Embryonic stem cells and this new form of induced pluripotent stem cells do more things. There are much more basic, fundamental cells. They haven’t become patterned or specialized in any particular tissue. The stem cells from adult tissues are already kind of restricted. The stem cells from the blood only form blood; they don’t form skin.

When President Bush announced his policy in 2001, it essentially took the federal government out of the oversight of most embryonic stem cell research. That left it up to the scientists to create guidelines themselves. Here in the US, the National Academy of Scientists came out with a set of guidelines, and internationally the International Society for Stem Cell Research came out with independent guidelines. I chaired the task force for this international society, and we established guidelines which defined areas of permissible research and impermissible research. There has been a longstanding tradition that respects the ability to work with a human embryo up to 14 days. Fourteen days is considered the time when the early human form starts to take shape, and there’s the sense that beyond that there’s a boundary, and scientists have been comfortable working in the petri dish with the cells prior to that stage. Virtually all international societies that have looked at this respected that 14-day rule.

The most important, fundamental aspect of stem cell research in the ethical guidelines is that the individuals involved be allowed to engage voluntarily with full, informed consent. So the couples that are involved are given tremendous instruction about the nature of stem cell research and the way their cells will be used, and they have the voluntary right to engage or to refuse without it influencing the type of medical care they are going to get. There are those kinds of practices of personal autonomy, voluntary informed consent, the notion that there are permissible and impermissible areas of research, such as a prohibition against human cloning. That’s part of all the ethical guidelines. These are the kinds of principles that have given the scientific community a road map to work from and I think gives the greater community the sense that this is being done with really scrupulous ethical oversight.

We add genes from embryonic stem cells into skin cells or to blood cells, and they become essentially just like embryonic stem cells. So they allow us to model diseases, determine disease mechanisms, understand pathology, maybe develop drugs to repair the pathology, and maybe develop tissues that we can transplant to cure disease. The question often arises, why do we still need embryonic stem cells? We wouldn’t have induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells without embryonic stem cells. The IPS cells, as they are called, are built on the foundation of knowledge from embryonic stem cells. We are now just learning about IPS cells. They are new. We don’t know for a fact that they are identical to embryonic stem cells. There’s an emerging sense that their genomes may be unstable, that they may have differences that would preclude them from certain clinical applications. So it’s still valuable to understand the natural embryonic stem cells side by side with the IPS cell. There are also many questions, we should remember, that pertain to the earliest human embryos that will never be studied or understood by looking at skin cells that would be turned back into embryonic stem cells. The science of the early embryo is going to teach us things about human infertility, about early birth defects, and unfortunately under the current federal policy we still can’t use federal dollars to study early embryos, and that leaves us ignorant about many fundamental questions, and I think that’s unfortunate. We can study the cells that come from embryos, but we can’t study the embryos themselves by using federal dollars. That is still restricted. So it’s important for people to realize that the Obama policy has opened up new frontiers, but there are still areas that remain closed to federally funded researchers.

There is a deep divide in the Congress that reflects a divide in the US population about the nature of the human embryo. Currently, there is something called the Dickey-Wicker amendment, which is a rider on the appropriations bill that gets renewed every year, that prohibits the use of any federal dollars to be spent on research that destroys an embryo, that puts the embryo at harm. So unless that were changed by an act of Congress, biomedical scientists can’t ask questions about the early embryo that has relevance for infertility or birth defects. And so we as a society, at least as the Congress has decided, don’t go there. I hope it changes. I think we are remaining ignorant about some very fundamental questions. Our rate of success with infertility treatment is very, very low. The understanding of the basic biology of birth defects is still very poor, and we can’t study that unless we have the full strength and resources of the federal government, so I hope it does change one day, but I think it’s going to require an evolution of attitudes. You can’t even use the embryos that are created by IVF that are going to be discarded as medical waste. You can’t study those embryos using federal dollars. Only if you make the stem cell lines extracted from the embryos using private dollars can you then transfer them into federally funded research.

The Obama decision is not a complete liberalization of stem cell research policy. It simply expands the access to the more than 1,000 new stem cell lines. So it’s valuable, but it still leaves us with one hand tied behind our back in asking many questions about early human development.

The arguments will be made that now that we have IPS cells and we have adult stem cells, we no longer need embryonic stem cells. Scientists who study these cells don’t agree. There are many questions that remain unanswered about the behavior of IPS cells. Will they be the same as embryonic stem cells? Will they behave in a safe and productive matter? We know that already that adult stem cells don’t give us the same versitility as embryonic or IPS. So I would say, as a scientist and as a physician, it’s far too early to be closing any doors of opportunity. If we want to understand disease, if we want to push the frontiers of medical knowledge, we need all the tools available to us.

Kim Lawton and David Masci

President BARACK OBAMA:  As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each and work to ease human suffering.  I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.

LAWTON: The Catholic Church and several other religious groups oppose that research because it destroys the embryo, which they consider tantamount to killing an innocent human life.

Joining me with more is David Masci, senior research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  David, how controversial is this within the religious community?

DAVID MASCI (Senior Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life): Well, there are a range of different opinions in the American religious community. Jewish denominations and mainline Protestant churches, particularly more liberal mainline Protestant churches, support embryonic stem cell research. They say that embryos have intrinsic value and worth, but the incredible possibilities that stem cell research offer — cures for cancer and things like that —outweigh those concerns and considerations. On the other side, you have the Roman Catholic Church and you have more evangelical Protestant churches like the Southern Baptist Convention or the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. These churches oppose embryonic stem cell research. They say an embryo was a person and a person has the right to life and you can’t take that life away, even for the best of reasons.

LAWTON: What about the people in the pews? Do they agree with the leadership of these institutions?

Mr. MASCI: White evangelical Protestants tend to support their churches’ positions on this, only 31 percent of evangelicals support embryonic stem cell research, so a substantial majority say no, we don’t want embryonic stem cell research. With Catholics it’s the other way around. Fifty-nine percent of American Catholics support embryonic stem cell research, which of course goes exactly against what the Church’s leadership is saying. Now when you ask Catholics who attend Mass regularly, weekly, whether they support embryonic stem cell research, that number drops to 46 percent. So people actually in the pews, people who are attending Roman Catholic services, they do — they are more likely to support their leadership’s views on this than Catholics as a whole.

LAWTON: What about the issue of adult stem cells? There are some opponents of embryonic stem cell research that say this is a way of getting the stems cells without destroying the embryo, and therefore it might be an ethical alternative. Is that indeed a viable alternative?

Mr. MASCI: It might be. I think that’s the right way to put it. Scientists tell us that they’ve made an enormous number of strides especially recently in this area. They’ve been able to reprogram skin cells, for example, to act like embryonic stem cells so that they can be used in all different kinds of ways. But scientists also say that these cells and embryonic stem cells, in both cases they’re not really ready for medical therapy yet. They haven’t reached the point where they feel confident that they can do all the things that they hope they can do. So their position—scientists are saying, you know, what we need to do is work in both areas, with adult stem cells and with embryonic stem cells. On the other hand, you have some opponents of embryonic stem cell research saying adult stem cells are clearly the way to go. They eliminate the ethical considerations, and given the advances that have been made recently it’s clear that that’s where we’re headed in terms of this therapy.

LAWTON: All right. David Masci, thank you very much.

Mr. MASCI: Thank you, Kim.

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.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a report today on a conflict between solving crimes and protecting privacy. It’s called “familial searching.” Police can now take DNA from a crime scene and compare it to millions of DNA samples in a government database. If there is even a partial match, that could lead to the criminal by way of his or her family members if their DNA is in the database. And they could be completely innocent. Should that practice be legal? Lucky Severson reports.

Unidentified Man (working in lab): Stick it right back in there. Okay, and we’ll close it up right there. And this is the same thing, these are …

LUCKY SEVERSON: Three years ago, Pearl Wilson’s son Charles died in a Maryland prison while awaiting sentencing for rape. But for his mother, her son lives on.

PEARL WILSON: My son lives in me and I in him, and his blood is my blood, and my blood was in him.

SEVERSON: Though Charles is dead his DNA still sits in a databank. By law DNA has to be gathered from all felons. Some states even take it from arrestees. The DNA profiles remain there indefinitely.

Ms. WILSON: I’m worried about them continuously holding my son’s DNA in that database.

Pearl Wilson

SEVERSON: Attorney Stephen Mercer, who specializes in DNA issues, says Pearl Wilson has reason to be worried. He’s trying to get her son’s DNA expunged from the database because he’s concerned it might be used at some point for what is called familial searching, a new technology that has been used sparingly so far in the U.S. The most notable case was the so-called “BTK” serial killer, Dennis Rader. After 30 years and 10 murders, the BTK killer was finally caught after police obtained a DNA sample from his daughter that almost perfectly matched the DNA from her father’s crime scenes.

STEPHEN MERCER (Attorney): DNA between persons who are related is vastly more similar than DNA between persons who are unrelated. So when the government has the DNA of one family member, in effect, they have the DNA of that person’s siblings, children and parents.

SEVERSON: Here’s how it works. DNA from a crime scene is run against the nearly six million samples on file. If there’s a partial match, it likely means that a relative of someone in the database is guilty of a crime. This kind of testing could open up a whole new realm of possibilities for authorities. But critics warn that is could mark the beginning of dragnets, sweeping in people who are completely innocent and possibly violating their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Sonia Suter is a bioethics professor and she’s concerned that people will see only the benefits of familial testing and not the threat to personal privacy.

Professor SONIA SUTER (George Washington University Law School): There’s a lot of kinds of uses of this — of these samples that sound great. They look good on programs like “CSI” but they might involve probing too deeply into very personal information. Could the police decide they want to do broad scale research on these samples, and start investigating the samples for links to certain kinds of illnesses, or certain kinds of propensities for behavior?

Sonia Suter

SEVERSON: Professor Suter says familial testing without safeguards may be only the beginning of a very slippery slope.

Prof. SUTER: I think people might start to feel differently about this if they imagined all of the information that could potentially be obtained. And it will only get easier to do as we identify more genes. It will only be cheaper as the technology advances.

SEVERSON: Constitutional law professor Jeffrey Rosen says the use of familial testing could signal a dramatic challenge to American civil liberties.

Professor JEFFREY ROSEN (George Washington University Law School): There’s a very profound moral lesson. My mother taught it to me actually. She said, “You should be responsible not for what you think but what you do.” And yet that idea is really being challenged by an idea of genetic surveillance that would hold people accountable not for wrong doing but for wrong being.

MITCH MORRISSEY (District Attorney, Denver): There is no privacy right that is being violated by doing familial searching.

SEVERSON: : Mitch Morrissey, the District Attorney of Denver, is a vocal advocate for familial searching. He says it’s just another tool to track down leads, the way police use partial license plates and fingerprints.

Mr. MORRISSEY: The idea that there will be some people that will be talked to that may have nothing to do with this is not unusual when you look at police work.

SEVERSON: Familial testing could help bring many more criminals to justice, says medical geneticist Frederick Bieber, who works with law enforcement on DNA issues. He co-authored a study published in Science magazine.

Frederick Bieber

Dr. FREDERICK BIEBER (Medical Geneticist): ): Based on simulations, our data suggest that it could increase the yield of investigative leads by 40 percent. So it could substantially increase the number of cases that can be resolved through added investigative leads. Why? Because of the sad reality that habits of crime are often found more commonly in family members than in unrelated individuals.

SEVERSON: Statistics indicate crime does run in families: 46 percent of inmates, in one recent survey, said they had a blood relative also in jail. One black man in nine between the ages of 20 and 34, according to a recent Pew estimate, is now behind bars. With databanks getting larger because of familial testing, critics like Stephen Mercer worry that police will be even more likely to target those areas and those minorities whose only guilt is living in the wrong place.

Mr. MERCER: For minority populations who are already disproportionately in the database, you’re approaching a scenario where nearly a majority of some populations — minority based populations — are going to find themselves under genetic surveillance by the government.

Mr. MORRISSEY: Many, many of these crimes are crimes against persons of color – people that live in the same neighborhoods, and I talk to those people, and those people want these crimes solved.

Tony Lake

TONY LAKE (Chief Constable, Lincolnshire Police, England): I do think that the plight of victims is much underplayed.

SEVERSON: Tony Lake is the chief constable of the Lincolnshire police in England. The United Kingdom has used familial matching since 2002.

Mr. LAKE: It is perfectly reasonable and absolutely right that the rights of suspects should be considered and, as it were, maintained as paramount when they aren’t actually under investigation. But so too do the victims have rights. So too do the family of victims have rights. So yes, there are some very, very difficult issues which we’ve got to confront here. But frankly the bottom line is we believe it is a risk worth taking and it is a process well worth doing.

SEVERSON: Police in the UK have resolved murders and rapes and other cases by tracing the perpetrator through a relative’s genetic profile. One case involved a man who had been raping and terrorizing women for 20 years. Known as the “shoe rapist,” police finally discovered who he was when a DNA sample from one of the rapes was a close match to his sister, whose DNA profile was in the data base for a minor infraction.

Mr. LAKE: The way that we operate in the United Kingdom is that unless there is some other substantial evidence the use of DNA on its own will not be run by the Crown Prosecution Service, the equivalent of your state prosecutor. They simply will not entertain running on the basis of DNA evidence alone.

SEVERSON: U.S. authorities say they will also require other supporting evidence. But opponents argue that the FBI has been known to overstep its bounds in other investigations. And even though agents may be held accountable for overzealous prosecution, by then the damage to someone’s reputation has been done.

Ms. WILSON: I have not been in trouble a day in my life. They could come to my family members and even me. It is violating rights of innocent people.

SEVERSON: Pearl no longer needs to worry about her son’s DNA coming back to haunt the family, because Maryland has become the first state to ban familial testing. But several other states, with California in the lead, intend to approve familial searching, and that appears to be the national trend.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a report today about one of the most prominent pediatric neurosurgeons in the world: Dr. Ben Carson. He’s probably best known for his surgeries to separate conjoined twins. Carson talks about his work and his Seventh-day Adventist faith in a new book out this month called TAKE THE RISK. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON: Ben Carson knows a lot about risk. As one of the leading pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, Carson makes life and death decisions nearly every day, and he has gained international fame for his work separating twins joined at their heads. Carson believes risk can be a good thing. But he says most Americans are obsessed with security.

Dr. BEN CARSON (Pediatric Neurosurgeon, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions): A lot of people simply don’t realize their potential because they’re just so risk adverse. They just don’t want to take the risk.

LAWTON: Carson is a committed Seventh-day Adventist. He says when he makes his own risk assessments, he seeks guidance from God.

Dr. CARSON: I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do — and not only for operating, but for everything.

Dr. Ben Carson

LAWTON: Faith and risk have defined Carson’s life, both personally and professionally. He directs pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to his work with conjoined twins, Carson has pioneered surgical techniques to stop seizures. Not bad for a kid from inner-city Detroit whom many people would have written off.

Dr. CARSON: I was definitely an at-risk kid growing up. You know, my parents got divorced early on. My mother only had a third-grade education, was illiterate, worked as a domestic two to three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. I was considered the dummy in the classroom when I was in 5th grade, and I just didn’t believe that I could do the work, so I engaged myself, you know, by creating disturbances.

LAWTON: His mother, Sonya Carson, prayed for wisdom on how to help her two sons. She mandated that they write two book reports a week for her.

Dr. CARSON: Not knowing she couldn’t read, I mean, she would highlight and checkmark and stuff, and we’d think she was reading them. But she could always discuss them with you. She said, “Let’s talk about your book report.” It only really took a month maybe before I started to enjoy the reading. Something happened. I got to the point where I couldn’t wait to get home and read my books.

LAWTON: He began seeing a future for himself. But Carson says he faced another challenge — his explosive temper. He was often getting in fights. Then, when he was 14, he tried to stab a friend but the knife blade hit the boy’s belt buckle.

Dr. CARSON: It dawned upon me at that moment I was trying to kill somebody over nothing, and, you know, I locked myself in the bathroom and I just started thinking about it and I said, you’re not going to accomplish your dream of becoming a doctor; you’re going to end up in jail or reform school or dead.

Carson says he reads from the Book of Proverbs every day

LAWTON: He says he prayed for God’s help and then picked up a Bible, which opened to the Book of Proverbs and verses about anger. He believes God took away his temper and enabled him to become a surgeon. Carson still reads from the Book of Proverbs every day. He says it is part of his spiritual preparation for surgery.

Dr. CARSON: My strong belief is that God created human beings and therefore he knows about every aspect of the human body. So if I want to fix it, I just need to stay in harmony with him.

LAWTON: For Carson, surgery is often a spiritual experience.

Dr. CARSON: When I look at the human brain I’m still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra, and there it is, the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us. I don’t particularly like, you know, cutting the brain. It’s such a beautiful thing, why cut it? And I’m not even sure I like surgery. But I like what it does.

LAWTON: Seeing the mechanics of the body, he says, has taught him about the non-tangible aspects of life.

Dr. CARSON: We are more than just flesh and bones. There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there.

Conjoined twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani

LAWTON: Carson has had many high-profile cases. In his new book, TAKE THE RISK, he describes one of the toughest decisions of his career. In 2003, he was asked to be part of a surgical team trying to separate 29-year-old Iranian twins whose skulls were fused together. The surgery had a less than 50 percent chance of success. Carson was reluctant, but then he met Ladan and Laleh Bijani.

Dr. CARSON: They said, “Doctor, we would rather die than spend another day together.” And, you know, that kind of takes you aback. But then I put myself in their place and I said what if you were stuck to the person you liked the most in the world 24/7 and you could never get away from them for even one second? And I realized what they were going through.

“We are more than just flesh and bones.”

LAWTON: He ultimately decided to be part of the controversial surgery, which took place in Singapore.

Dr. CARSON: It became very clear as time went on that they were going to go through with the operation whether I helped or not. So at that point, you know, I started thinking there’s not a very good chance of success here, so I’d better go and help, because if they die I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life if it could have turned out differently if I would have helped.

LAWTON: Despite his help, after more than 50 hours of surgery Ladan died, and then Laleh died 90 minutes after that.

Dr. CARSON: I always say if God didn’t allow any bad things to happen, we would already be in heaven, and we are not there. That’s where trust and faith comes in. You just say, “Lord, I don’t understand it. But one thing I do know is that you understand it and that you are in control and I trust you.” And that’s the end of the story.

LAWTON: At 56, he says he has seen many miracles, too. It’s tough to keep up with him as he visits his many patients in the pediatric intensive care unit. His staff calls this the “lightning rounds.” And despite the pace, there’s always time for a personal word with the patients and a hug from grateful families. And he has been forced to face his own mortality. In 2002, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After treatment, Carson says he’s now cancer-free.

Carson has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Carson tries to have an impact outside the operating room. In 2004, he was appointed to the President’s Council on Bioethics, and Carson has become a vocal advocate for health insurance reform.

Dr. CARSON: I see the insurance issue, the coverage of people for health care in our country, as a huge moral issue. And, you know, for the richest country in the world to have 47 million people without health insurance is ridiculous.

LAWTON: One of Carson’s greatest passions is encouraging education, especially for at-risk kids. He and his wife have started a national scholarship program called the Carson Scholars Fund.

Dr. CARSON: If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

LAWTON: He admits one big danger for neurosurgeons can be developing a God complex.

Dr. CARSON: You’re going into these incredibly delicate places that control who people are, and you’ve got to have a fair ego to think you can do that. But for me personally, I realize where it all comes from. All the good things come from God. I can’t really claim any of them, and I just feel privileged that I was dealt a measure of the healing arts.

LAWTON: Faith may be a risk, he says, but it’s the best risk of all. I’m Kim Lawton in Baltimore.

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.