Perspectives on Life's Technologies by Gayle E. Woloschak, PhD.

as a member of the advisory committee of the institute for religion and science at Chestnut Hill College I would like to welcome you to tonight's event a particularly warm welcome to the many who are here for the first time The Institute of Religion and science was established seven years ago to promote the constructive engagement of religion and spirituality with science and technology and to encourage a dialogue that is Interfaith multi-science and civil to this end we sponsor lectures a reading Circle and other events do check our website for resources particularly for past videos and for our blog also be sure to sign up for our mailing list which can help you stay aware of upcoming programs tonight we are pleased to welcome Gail wallashak and her presentation perspectives On Life's Technologies Gail wallashek is a professor of radiation oncology Radiology cell and molecular biology in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University Gail received her BS in biological sciences from Youngstown State University and a PhD in medical Sciences from the University of Toledo Medical College of Ohio she did her post-doctoral training at the Mayo Clinic and then moved on to Argonne National Laboratory until 2001. she is also associate dean of graduate student and postdoctoral Affairs at The Graduate School at Northwestern University Dr wallashak also has a demon degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary where her work focused on bioethical issues she teaches science and religion classes at the Lutheran School of Theology Chicago and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary without further delay let us welcome Dr Gail wallashak [Music] um so I put my email address up so that if anybody has any questions afterwards wants to get in touch with me I'm happy to talk to chit chat um to email back and forth first let me start with my introduction so I always I I don't like to start my science religion discussions with this joke but I have to put the joke on the slide because sometimes I forget the punch line so it loses its meaning so the story goes like this um the pope made it issued a decree years ago this is you know back in 15 1600s that all the Jews that were located in Rome either had to convert to to Christianity or they had to leave and he had arguments from the Jewish community and finally they agreed that they would have a trial debate so the Jews would pick their best Rabbi put him up against the pope and they would debate many different issues the problem was the rabbi spoke no Italian the pope spoke no Yiddish so they had to do a lot of their debating with hand gestures so if they started out the debate and the pope and Rabbi sat across from each other and the pope put his the pope um raised his hand and showed three fingers and the rabbi raised one finger next the pope wait waved his finger around his head and then the rabbi pointed down to the ground uh right where he was he was sitting then the pope brought out a communion wafer and started to eat it with a chalice of wine and the rabbi pulled out an apple and with that the pope stood up and he said that's it you've won you've bested me at every point so the par Cardinals met later with the Pope and they they asked him you know we didn't understand this debate what happened and the pope said first I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity and he responded by holding up a single finger to tell me that even though there's the tree there's still one common God that we have then I waved my finger around my head to show him that God was all around us and he respond responded by pointing to the ground saying he was right here with us and then finally I pulled out the wine and the wafer to show that God absolves us of our sins and the rabbi pulled down an apple to remind us of the original sin he bested me in every move I could not continue meanwhile the Jewish Community gathered around the rabbi and asked how he'd won and the rabbi said I have no clue what happened first he told me that we had three days to get out of Italy so I gave him the finger that the whole country would be cleared of Jews and I told them that we were staying right here and then what happened and he said and then he took out at his launch so I took out mine and there we go we can stay um I I tell this story because it's one of miscommunication and I often believe that the science religion dialogue that we have ongoing Among Us is kind of like the pope and the rabbi talking to each other we're talking past each other we're using hand gestures but we're often not talking with each other so I I just want I think that's a good uh way to think about things another approach and you know I as was mentioned in the introduction I'm a practicing scientist I have a research lab but I also have a doctor of ministry degree and work a lot in the um science religion Community particularly uh Eastern Orthodox Community where I um I'm a member so there were surveys done a number of years ago and they asked children what do you think about scientists and the children said that scientists speak a foreign language that no one can understand and you know that was actually true I think we do speak a language that nobody can understand that we live underground I mean that one is a bit of a scratch we wear white coats even when we sleep we wear glasses and we don't require food um I'm not sure where all these ideas came from but uh most of them you know are not quite in the realm of accuracy but it's the view of adults it tells us something so the adult said yes scientists speaking language nobody can understand but they also said scientists are anti-social and that they've cured diseases that only rich people can get cures for and I think that points to the great distrust that we have in society for scientists today and somehow science needs to work to overcome these kinds of issues because neither one is true I mean most scientists are not anti-social and certainly uh we have not cured diseases that only get argument where the cures are only given to a few few people now science is important for us it it um is about understanding the world around us through our education we learn about all the things that are ongoing in the world um through medicine I think there's probably nobody who's listening that hasn't been impacted by medicine either through some new technique for diagnosis like the CT scan that house you'll want to know about prize for or the Mr or any of the diagnostic techniques the treatments that we use and I work in the cancer field mostly and we have a lot of treatments that we that have come from science itself certainly their quality of life issues and end-of-life issues that are important um think about ecology the dialogue that goes on about recombinant foods should we be using recombinant Foods what about environmental issues and then the topic I want to focus on a lot today which will dovetail with these others is about technology um we have new technologies that are shaping what we can do most of them are coming from point cloning Technologies genome science beginning of Life issues genetic counseling and I have to tell you I'm not sure I'll get through my entire talk in this amount of time but I'll get as far as I can and hopefully we can cover some of the other stuff uh when we come to discussion toward the end so I want to emphasize that it's it might not be apparent but science actually drives the ethics um I could use the covet example but I think I'm going to use the HIV example because it's older and more distant from us and easier to see so when when HIV AIDS first came into um existence nobody knew what what AIDS was caused from they didn't know it was caused by a virus they didn't know that how the virus was transmitted and it was scary for people just as covet was scary for people um and so in in the early days there was talk of quarantining everybody that had AIDS um to restrict their interactions to restrict their medical care a lot of times um they were left in hospitals with uh very not not ever touching a person as we heard so much with coven um and then finally science demonstrated with the route of transmission was for AIDS that it was caused by the HIV virus that it was transmitted only by bodily fluids it could not be spread through the air and so then it now became unethical to say we're going to quarantine people because we knew how it was spread we knew how to stop it from spreading we knew what to do in order to um to change our behaviors to not have it spread so the facts that we learned from science helped to shape what was became an ethical treatment of patients and I think that um hand-in-hand relationship between science and um and certainly ethics particularly for Technologies for diseases is very important we all saw it with covet as well where you know people feel a lot better now that we know how it's transmitted um at the time we were like wiping down every surface that we possibly could with alcohol staying in our homes to prevent others from getting it now we know that masks can protect us we know the many different things that can be done and that was because of the science that that came about so just a quick definition of what ethics is it's it's a branch of the philosophy and it involves coming up with a concept of what is right and wrong conduct um it's often used for uh discussing things that are disputes it comes from uh the Greek word epicos which means customer habit and um it investigates the best way for humans to live with kinds of actions one would consider right or wrong in particular circumstances now there are a lot of people that argue that ethics is not a good way to do things because it's not um it's not and it's not moral in a sense um and certainly many people in the church argue about whether ethics is appropriate or or not ethics is something that is done in the broad public context and it's not necessarily done for Morality as much as it is for um trying to treat people appropriately so I have a quote here from one of my favorites cereal Jerusalem wrote in 347 for the method of godliness consists of these two things Pious doctrines and virtuous practice and neither are the doctrines acceptable to God apart from Good Works nor does God accept the works which are not perfected with Pious doctrines for what profit is it to know well the doctrine's concerning God and yet to be a vile fornicator and again what profit is it to be nobly temperate and an impious blasphemer a more precious possession therefore is the knowledge of doctrines also there is need of a wakeful soul since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit so this was a view of ethics in 347. um I I think I think it its suits our thinking about ethics today at least to some extent um we not might not in today's world be as comfortable with uh God doctrines and other other perspectives but um that like concept about being lacking deceit and uh trying to understand through appropriate practice I think very much suits the things that we talk about today okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna try to get through a couple of new technologies I don't know that I'll get through all of them but I'll try to get through a few of them um the first one will be uh in vitro fertilization this one's relatively easy and uh and and and a relatively short so I'm hoping all the time to get into uh gene therapy for instance is the next one so way back in 2002 um there was a council that was developed on bioethics and it was set up by the president at the time and he impaneled a group of people to talk about what what should we do with human cloning and how do we think about human cloning and what was interesting was that what the committee did as their first task was not to sit down and Define cloning and Define all these different techniques they actually read a series of books to Define that were novels to talk about what does it mean to be a human being how do we understand human beings before we start thinking about cloning and technology and all these different things we need to think about what it means to be human um and the list of books is available on the web it was a very interesting list and it certainly affected uh the committee's discussions later they were they all said that it was probably a really good way to start with it now probably everybody on this call uh knows how in vitro fertilization takes place or how regular fertilization takes place this is uh the woman's reproductive track here is the ovary with the oocyte the egg popping out at ovulation it moves down the track eventually if it becomes fertilized it goes down down eventually at around day uh nine or ten it plants itself into the wall of the uterus the urine wall and so we have this uh process that takes place this is what happens in inside the woman's womb and you can see that it's going from a one cell stage to two cells to four cells eight cells in all of this well what people try to do with in vitro fertilization is to to take this out of the womb and to put it into a test tube where in most examples the embryo can't develop too much more than about a day six or eight eight days and then it's implanted into the womb of a woman who's been made hormonally pregnant and uh and hopefully the um fertilized egg uh the product the embryo takes place takes seats itself in the uterine wall and becomes and becomes a mature child and this is just a picture actually this is from a mouse my language of mice not with people um this is a a mouse egg and you can actually see there's a bit of a shell around it that's the way it looks in uh in in uh humans as well there's a bit of a shell around the egg to protect it and then as it starts to develop I don't know how I even see it but here are a bunch of cells this is about the 16 cell phase right now in a plate so this is a single cell and this is all the cells in a plate just so you can see what they look like okay so there's this process that happens naturally that we now try to use technology to change why do we do in vitro fertilization and what does it mean well in vitro means in the test tube and fertilization means exactly the joining of the egg in the sperm so instead of they're taking place in the womb as we just you just looked at it takes place in a test tube um the clinical definition of what it's used to treat are fertility disorders but at the end of the day it's basically to help couples that are not fertile to Bear children um originally people call them test tube babies because they were born in pest tubes although honestly they were always born in plates so they should call them Petri plate babies but nobody does that um and so so what we do is we we I since what most science scientists do is they isolate eggs from the mother sperm from the father they mix them in a Petri culture blade they let them develop for several days and then they implant them back into the mother as I said and the leftover fertilized eggs in the test tube can be used for a variety of purposes sometimes they keep them to use for new embryos sometimes people talk about using them for embryonic stem cells although that has not happened and sometimes they just line our freezer chests uh never never used at all so there are many questions that come up in the ethics of discussion of the IVF technology um and I'm going to do my best to not make judgments on them but I'll talk about the arguments that people make um in in the course of this um so there's one argument that people use against in vitro fertilization that has a course that it's not natural um but most issues of Technology are not natural including the use of chemo for cancer um the second is what what's the what's the idea there about doing IVF why can't you just go go adopt children and some people say that it's a selfishness on the part of the parents who insist upon passing their own genes on Next Generation rather than caring for um a child that needs to be raised there are some that argue justifiably that um there are high costs of adoption it's sometimes difficult to enculturate an adopted child into a household um there are also um a lot of issues about you adopt and years later the parents are looking the real parents are looking for the child of the birth parents are looking for the child and then finally IVF is very expensive I mean adoption is expansion expensive but IVF is much more so so um these are arguments people use um I'm not going to try to argue one way or the other um I have friends that have gone through IVF and they will they feel very strongly that it was a good thing for them for their families here's what it looks like and actually my lab does um work not with human uh embryos we work with mouse but you have like a little tip that holds the uh egg in place and uh this was this is actually a fertilized egg it's there a few eggs here so this is an embryo what this tube is doing is it's sucking out one cell so it can test and see if the embryo is going to be normal um so they're doing genetic testing here but you use um the same kinds of techniques to be able to to move around embryos so that you can choose which embryos might be more healthy than others but there are unique aspects to this technology that need to be mentioned um that one of them is what we call pre-implantation genetic diagnosis where while this embryo is in test tube you actually run a test on it for its genetic diseases and then you decide whoa this baby is going to have genetic diseases we are not going to implant that one in the womb we are going to implant a different one um there was example in Minnesota a number of years ago where a child had leukemia at a young age around two years old and the parents got pregnant with a child who would have the right cell type to be able to replace the leukemic cell in their two-year-old child um so they were actually selecting poor particular proteins that would be made in the embryo to make sure they could correct for the defect in their other child um and then in 2009 for the first time we see clinics popping up La was the first to do this where they would offer screening for gender and physical traits here's one of these advertisements um and the article about it talked about unnatural selection where you could actually take the eggs that were fertilized with the sperm choose the one that is remove the cell using a Technique we just looked at test it for female green eyes and blonde hair or male brown eyes and dark hair or whatever you want implant it back in the embryo and there we go this one is the brown hair blue eyed baby girl um certainly this uh this goes on frequently it's been going on since 2009 there's nothing illegal with it but I do think it um pulls out some ethical issues into question um there's not just screening for hair color and uh other traits but there are there's screening for you know no diseases lacking particular diseases and a lot of times you know I'll mention this later but we don't always understand how genes and uh disease relate in many examples and so we may be altering uh our genetic uh population in ways we don't understand now uh just so we're clear um this is the uh this is the idea of twinning so uh there can be twins that are born from these in vitro fertilization uh steps and usually there are twins there can sometimes be triplets some in the old days they used to have even uh six babies born at the same time because they would implant in a bunch of embryos and they would all take oh we no longer do that because it's not healthy for the mother um but in a DI amniotic twins the two babies cleave away from each other in days around day three at the latest in those that have um a single uh symptom but two amions it's at eight days ones that have one placenta and one amnion it's up to 13 days and this is probably the last point at which you would get kind of normal twing as around day 13 and then after that we start to see versions of conjoined twins which um you know will lead to many problems that must be handled surgically okay so I I deliberately put the in vitro fertilization first so that we can set the stage for uh stem cells as the next um important discussion so um what is dumpster research it is where we take undeveloped cells and we try to use them as replacement cells in adults um they they are put in the body in certain locations and when they're put in the right location they mature to be that particular cell type in the body um there are many people hypothesize that there are diseases that could be treated with stem cells and you've probably heard of some um you know I recently had knee replacement surgery but one of my neighbors had uh stem cells put in her knee uh to replace her uh knee joint properly now honestly it was not very successful for her and most of the technology has not been so good for me but in in cases where there aren't many choices for what you can do like a spinal cord injury for instance people are trying it um there are some side effects that come with it and one of the side effects is when you put stem cells in a lot of times they behave a little bit like tumor cells and so an example of spinal cord injury there were some people that developed on uh spinal cords but the I developed cancers in the spinal cord but there are lots of potential uses of stem cells certainly for heart attacks for muscular dystrophy for wound healing saying bone marrow transplantation in fact we use bone marrow transplantation now we use stem cells we've been using it for decades it's a form of stem cell transplant that we accept is the bone marrow transplant so the the issue then becomes what kinds of stem cells do we use um the adult stem cells have been used for decades as I said before they've been bone marrow transplants where we look for people that match for their proteins and we give the bone marrow and one to the other my own church has supported their use and so have most churches have been not been opposed to adult stem cell therapies there are a few that have um they've been developed for cardiac diseases with some limited success there are new approaches where they take adult cells and they reprogram them to be stem cells so they make them go backwards in their function and now and then therefore they can serve many different functions but the problem with adult stem cells is that again just like with bone marrow stem cells you much must have a match so the easiest thing is going to be to take my own stem cells and use them to treat me um and that's what people are trying to do now there is an older method um or let me put the same a more controversial method that was uh called embryonic stem cells where they took those in vitro fertilized eggs and or embryos and they um and they would use those as the stem cells they were less limiting because they can develop into many different self types but the problem was that they um they had to match one person to person but this was an example where the religious communities actually had an influence over the discussion because many groups including Protestants and Catholics did not support the use of IVF embryo embryonic stem cells they opposed It And scientists actually said well this isn't going to work we're not going to get enough support to do this we better go back and develop new methods for adult stem cells so it is one of the rare examples where the religious community has actually changed the shape of how science is done in a modern age this is sort of the concept here with the in with the embryonic stem cells is you would take them out of the human fetus you would then allow these cells you didn't plant them into circulatory system or nervous system an immune system and when they are in that environment they become that cell type we don't really understand why but it happens and they now can make up for deficiencies that you might find in those particular systems and of course you know Alzheimer's has been one of those that people have been looking for for a long time and haven't um had you know good luck and so so then to add to our concept of IVF leftover fertilized eggs and test tubes can be used for embryonic stem cells and that would be the concept but as I said it was met with so much resistance it's not really even um approved for most uses today um and in fact most groups that favor stem cell research do not support the use of aborted fetuses for those purposes um there are some groups that do support using in future fertilized eggs for that purpose is because they've they were sitting in freezers they're not being used they've never been implanted into um a woman or into a womb nevertheless even those there is some concern about their usage so what then happened was uh new techniques were developed for inducing pluripotent stem cells I'm not going to go into what that means I just want you to know that's what this abbreviation come comes from but you would get mature cells you would put a virus in that has genes in the virus that make them become more stem-like you would then have these cells that originally came from mature cells that are now more stem-like cells um and those are cells where they can come out of any person and can be used for that purpose there are pros and cons of of using these um induced player potent stem cells you do have to take the adult stem cells and reprogram them they don't happen very efficiently it happens with a very low rate um when you do it you have to put in this viral sequence this virus this virus puts itself into the genome and it sorts itself into the DNA into the genetic material of the original cells and whenever that happens it comes with the risk of um coming in near a gene that causes cancer and maybe causing cancer and that became a risk it maybe was a little bit too great they can't even on their own go on to become tumor cells and sometimes the reprogramming is incomplete um but the advantage was you don't need embryonic cells you don't need to worry about graft rejection but now we've moved from using stem cells to moving Gene editing Technologies um and I'll I'll mention those uh in in the next few moments but there's a lot of work being done with developing artificial organs here's an artificial heart uh that's being generated so we will see a lot of that and um finally we come to my third technology here which is Gene editing and I believe that this is the technology du jour um my lab does a lot of this we do it again in mice not in people but I think there are some questions to think about here um the first question is should we do Gene editing and the answer is we already do it the next question is should we do it in humans and the answer is we already do it the third question is should we do it in eggs and sperm cells should we do it in those germ cells not the ones that make up our body but the eggs and sperm that we'll pass it on to offspring we don't already do it there and that's controversial what do we use to justify using gene editing and what influences do we need to consider so let's look at the examples we already do it here's the example of how we already do it lab animals we do it all the time we've been doing Gene editing for probably six seven eight years in lab animals we're trying to understand how particular genes are associated with disease and so we edit the gene in order to find out how It's associated with disease but we also use it as a tool for material production so think about insulin for a moment um people used to inject Pig insulin into themselves and what happened they would get a terrible immune reaction to the pig insulin after a while so we needed to come up with a way to make lots and lots of human insulin so we took the human insulin Gene we engineered it into the mammary gland of a cow so when the cow made milk it also made insulin and then we milked the cow and we purify the insulin and that's how most of our insulin come is is made is made today and it's from this Gene editing certainly we engineer a lot of organisms uh for to make them be resistant to certain stresses and then there's the issue of genetically modified crops which is a very big issue in both Canada and um and Europe and I would say some in the US as well here's just an example the first genetically modified mice that were done these mice had put in them A protein that makes them glow in the dark uh or make certain organs glow in the dark here's the normal animal here are the two mutant animals you can see how it's uh glowing it worked really well um should we do it in humans and the answer is we do when we do it in humans we do it only for somatic cells so I mentioned this earlier I'll say it again we have two kinds of cells in our body eggs and sperm that we call germ cells and somatic cells which is every other cell in our body if we modify the somatic cells in the body it's never going to be passed on to offspring but if we modify eggs and sperm it's going to go on to uh their offspring and their offspring and their offspring and their offspring so what are we going to do by modifying eggs and sperm in a way we're we're modifying all of humanity we're putting new genes in the human gene pool as we call it or the pool of the entire genes of the human genome and therefore we're causing modifications that could create problems which of the ones we're doing today in the somatic cells most of them are genetic diseases that are single Gene deficiency diseases I will tell you that is not the most common type of disease in humans most of our diseases are multi-genic um cancer is multi-genic diabetes is multi-genic but there are a few that we know are single Gene deficiencies I'll mention one in a moment so most techniques have involved Gene replacement not modification but there is some work being done on modification and um there are some older Technologies in gene editing before the development of a modern technique called crispr that I'll mention in just a moment but here's the story of some of the first genetically modified children so there's a disease called severe combined immunodeficiency it is it's it's present in children um they inherit it generally from their mothers and they don't have a functional immune system at the end they're missing only one protein so they would raise these children in these so-called bubbles they would call them bubble babies because they would grow in a bubble they would never have any contact with the outside world because as soon as they did they would get infected and die from it but it was learned that what the gene was that was involved they we created a virus that you could infect in these children and now they could make the protein they were missing and they could come out and live a relatively normal life they had to be reinfected with the virus like every 10 years but this was a genetically modified human that is that was genetically modified and as I said uh you know really this is one of the first examples there are there are other examples should we do it in the human germ cells and I think there are three main questions that need to be asked and I don't have the answers to this I do not favor doing this right now I think that we need to have a lot more discussion on it but number one is that all the existing techniques that were used were limited remember what I mentioned about the virus you infect and it could put itself anywhere in the in the genome and when it did that it could cause cancer well there's a new technique called crispr that I'll show you in a moment crispr takes away that problem I still have to worry about damage to the human gene pool and then I think there are ethical concerns about um our how who do we modify and who don't we so there's this new technique that came out maybe six seven years ago um it's called crispr um crispr is a protein nucleic acid complex what does that mean it is a protein bound to DNA or RNA it's a protein that's bound to genetic material but it's usually a very small piece of the genetic material and what it can do that nothing else that we know of can do is inside our our genome inside our cells inside our nucleus we have billions of possible places for a DNA to be cut but crispr allows for a very precise place to be cut one place in all those billions of possible places can be targeted and designed to be cut with crispr this is amazing it changed the way we do everything this is a picture of what it looks like here's um the crispr itself the protein here is the DNA that is um inside of it and it's got an RNA in that it that helps to guide it I'll show you how this works in a moment but this is the structure of what this looks like this is how it works so what we do is we put in a piece of DNA that we want to put into the genome we put in what we call a guide RNA which takes our crispr we call it crispr cast 9 often because it's got a another protein with it but you put this together with the guide RNA the guide RNA is also nucleic acid and it carries this crispr cast 9 into the genome to exactly the place that you want it to it can cut out the DNA and put in the new DNA that is the right sequence so for the first time we can cut specific locations in the human genome and replace it with a new Gene so think about those bubble babies they can't make this Gene anymore well instead of creating a virus to do it where the virus could insert put itself down anywhere in the DNA now we put the correct Gene here we put the guide RNA that takes it to the right Gene bind it into the crispr cas9 goes into the nucleus cuts out the bad Gene puts in the good Gene Um this can be done with great efficiency and with almost no errors so this is going to revolutionize what we think about it has improved accuracy and the one thing I didn't mention is it actually has a tool where we can shut it off so we can turn it on and we can turn it off if we want now um I have about five minutes or seven minutes I'm not I'm not gonna I won't go into all the little specifics of how this works if anybody wants me to I I will but I will say that this was discovered actually in bacterial systems so bacteria we're using this as a defense against viruses they were cutting out viral sequences and um and protecting themselves in that way we introduced these these sequences artificially but our own body uses um normal processes to make it go it is the most efficient easy flexible and it's very very cheap um we we do it we can do it in the lab in a very short time uh the so-called off-target effects are minimal what does that mean it means that we get the gene we want and we don't get the other any other genes in the genome so therefore it's highly accurate in what it does but here's my worry um so what is the human gene pool a gene pool it it it's kind of like what you think about what's a swimming pool okay a swimming pool has all these people floating around swimming around in it a gene pool has all the genes floating around swimming in it and in most examples a a human gene pool contains all the genes of all the reproductively active or capable um people in the world at any one time the mouse gene pool contains all the genes of any reproductively active or capable mice in the entire world um that gene pool now is is um it it it's going to be changed if we start fooling around with genes that are in eggs and sperm because we will be making differences in the gene pool and we don't really know what differences those will have or what consequences those will have long term um Gene pools can change naturally um certainly survival in particular environments natural selection against certain processes changes our gene pool um the gene pool of you know five years ago was not the same gene pool as today's um the changes in gene frequencies will vary from in one way to another um but you know what um it's not clear to me who decides on what cells will happen so I want you to think for a moment about how we decide when a process is ethical in hospitals we have a group called the institutional review board and what the institutional review board does is they decide whether this technique is going to benefit this person or is it going to harm this person but who decides whether a particular technique is going to hurt or benefit Humanity nobody and the other concern is that most of our studies they last five years because that's how our funding works but if you want to follow problems with the gene pool you're going to need to watch changes over Generations not just for a very short time and I I do think that there are some hubris that comes in where we claim that we can predict the impact of muddling around with the human genome gene pool um for a lot of our genes we know only a very small amount of their function and of course as we progress we learn more about the functions of different genes so if we think that we can predict by making this modification it's going to have this impact I promise you we we don't know that for many many of the genes that we will work around with around it might be possible to do this with single Gene traits like that bubble baby situation I mentioned earlier but for more complicated diseases like diabetes or you know schizophrenia has 120 000 120 genes associated with it I mean how do you how do you think about that no I'm I don't think I have time to talk about sickle cell anemia even though I would love to talk about it um but I want to make this one point which is that genes can be good or bad depending on the tissue the time when they're active from multi-gene traits they all they have different influences that we can't predict um I do believe though at the end of the day the goal here is to eliminate human suffering um there are diseases like Tay Sachs disease and Huntington's disease that occur with you know serious neurocognitive concerns horrible diseases if we could cure those and those are diseases where it's not likely that we're going to be able to fix them by a single Gene we're actually gonna have to make changes the multiple plate parts of the body um stem cells are not going to do it there um you know it it it's it's a problem um you know alternately there's probably some suffering that is needed but you know needless suffering I think is something we don't want to have and then you know economics treating most of these diseases is going to be very expensive here's a guy I know who developed a do-it-yourself crispr kit you can you can buy it online for 150 bucks he's selling it out of his garage in uh Palo Alto close to uh Stanford I don't know what you would crisperize with it but okay I think I said said all this um okay I'm not gonna go through the end of life I just don't have time enough to do it but I'll make a few concluding thoughts um first of all um biotechnology has increased the number of decisions and turning points in our lives you know years and years ago if a couple couldn't have a baby they didn't think about ibf now they've got to think about um do we adopt or do we do IVF do we have a surrogate mother you know do we do we think about choosing the hair color of our baby I mean so so questions are very different and I think these leave challenges for families but particularly for people in religious communities to try to deal with them I strongly support collaboration between pastors and health professionals and I believe that it's in religion science dialogue like this that we end up helping people come to some of these conclusions um I'm gonna I'm gonna end on one um I'll end on this this point about unity and Science and religion I think that there are common themes in religion and Science and Technology fits as part of that science component first of all both have a belief in mystery that there are things that are unknown and maybe even things that are unknowable um both accept that there may be more to the story than they can explain um both have a mentorship model at least in many uh religious Traditions uh there's a spiritual director who provides advice to and counseling to uh members of a Parish Community or a congregation and yet in the scientific director from my students I Mentor them I mean and I don't scientists the test of Success is Not an exam it's living life and it's doing the task at here and with that I'm gonna just end um and thank you very much and I think I'm only a minute over hey there we go that's excellent um Gail that was riveting um I I myself uh teach a science religion class with a I'm a theologian and a philosopher and I teach with a chemist and one of the hardest things that we find uh is involved in teaching a science and religion class is to stay balanced between science and religion without tipping off into one or the other and your talk just now was you went back and forth across both domains with Incredible skill and uh and you seem to do it almost effortlessly effortlessly um I was riveted the entire time so I think that's my pleasure sincerely

2022-12-02 03:26

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