welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public visit our website for our program medical school and dr beckwith slab was the first to isolate and clone a gene from a bacterial chromosome this was in one nine hundred sixty nine and it was a crucial breakthrough in genetic science introducing for example the potential to control genes associated with inherited diseases however the beckwith group realized that there were also darker possibilities in gene manipulation and they expressed that concern directly at his nine hundred sixty nine press conference announcing the isolation of the gene dr beckwith warned that scientific and public vigilance would be necessary to prevent the negative potential of genetic engineering and since that time he's been an unrelenting voice for ethics in genetic engineering the isolation of the gene at the beck with lab was followed with a number of other beacher accomplishments including the discoveries of the switches that turn genes on and off protein folding in cells and the mechanisms of protein transport both inside the cell and the going out of the cells throughout his distinguished career dr beckwith has coupled his scientific work with social activism aimed at raising awareness of the potential misuse of genetic research for decades he's been a vocal critic in genetics that is the tendency to ascribe to an individual's genes complex characteristics such as intelligence and behaviors such as from anality we'll hear about some surprising examples this problem tonight dr beckwith was a member of the ethics committee of the human genome project in the one nine hundred eighty s and since one nine hundred eighty three he's taught a course called social issues in biology at harvard university one of the first of its kind today he's a member of the genetic screening study group which he'll tell us about as well dr beckwith has received many awards for his work including the abbot a lifetime achievement award from the american society for microbiology and the selman waxman award in microbiology from the national academy of sciences he's a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences also it is a very great honor to welcome dr john back with well things are and will start in if you will with giving us some background how you got into this field in the first place which was odd i think their early days of my career was basically carried on by what i did best in my classes mathematics chemistry etc but the same time when i was an undergraduate in college i took many courses in literature and other fields other than science and i ended up graduating feeling having mixed feelings about continuing in science but i basically let myself be carried on to the war through the normal path to follow and i got into graduate school in chemistry and i started to get even  more concerned about whether this is what i really wanted to do but during graduate school i discovered the work of some geneticists which i knew nothing about beforehand because i had never taken a genetics scores which really blew me away i was really overwhelmed with it they were french scientists who had not only done amazing work with very creative almost magical kind of findings but at the same time they wrote very beautifully and it just carried me along into my career which i hadn't necessarily expected was going to last so for several years i made an hochman know who made basically the fundamental discoveries that are the lore of original findings in molecular biology that really opened up the field of biology for along with two or three other important findings right you know you made your way to it in that matter and then how did you end up at harvard medical school i was in graduate school and then and at harvard then i went to do postdoc to work in various places and at some point i wasn't even sure i was going to find a job i was still trying to get into this french laboratory at the same time i was finally accepted i was offered a job at harvard medical school because my work became known at that point so i took the job because i didn't have any other offers that's why a and so i started on the project and i just got some very peculiar results and didn't make any sense and this doesn't fit with my idols yeah theories something funny here and i worked a lot along with  until it became clear that you know kind of small aspect of their work that made a significant misinterpretation of their results so in a way i didn't find something new i had found something that disproved something that well known scientists have done and that's enough to make one famous because you know that was sort of overnight and i say i don't know that how many people start out that you know because that was  that was sort of a groundbreaking thing all by itself but in any case you went on and you set up a lab at harvard and immediately got famous again can you tell us please something about the isolation of the gene that was such a big thing there in its technical aspects well it's funny people did this no discussion of isolating genes because nobody had thought of a way to do it and i don't know how many people were thinking of it and in fact when i look back particularly preparing for this interview i realize that we actually had the tools for doing it for years before we did it we didn't realize it didn't know yet we didn't the french side after that was there and then and took that back to start my lab and a few years later we isolated a none of what another one of these viruses carried these particular genes and that actually made it easier for us to realize we could do that make it pure gene right but it's i think it's kind of a question where people weren't even thinking about it because the tools weren't imaginable at that time but once we  then people came up with better and better techniques and just it's been moving on ever since then within three years of our isolation of this pure gene technique that made it very much easier to cut so it was a different thing now you went from there i mean you had one thing after another in this magical lab and you trained a number of very well known scientists correct so what else did you do in there that  s actually in those early days we we actually went from this this issue of the mistake that that the french coworkers had there because they were defining a particular site that was an important site for turning genes on and they had mistakenly misplaced it in the map of how the gene works and so we went on to actually get mutations that affected that site in the in the chromosome and we're able to define it very specifically and that settle that question by after that i got interested in moving on to more complex problems in biology and the next major area we went into was how to bacteria earth cells with cytoplasmic membranes that surround them and they often secrete certain proteins out of the cell into the surrounding media or in bacterial infections they secrete proteins into human cells or whatever animal they're affecting and we were very interested in what what's the process that themselves uses to move a protein that's being made inside the cell to outside the cell and again we use genetic approaches to isolate mutants that cause defects in that process and this allowed us to specify features of both the proteins and the cell that allowed this to happen and i sing so and then with that work a number of people also became very famous so this this is a big deal in the lab now over the years in  one particular aspect of protein folding which is important for a lot of proteins which is they form chemical bonds between amino acids in the protein that are very far away from each other the cold that sulfide bon and they lend a lot of stability to proteins particularly ones that are secreted out of that so like the problem we will work with earlier and over the years we with we discovered the mechanism whereby these bonds form and then begin to look at different bacterial organisms to find out whether they all did it the same way aware that they were different and zones in each organism to make these  and we found some things that surprised us and that was that they they did differ in becht among spec tyria and not to go into detail but out of that we discovered a way to look for a ntibiotics that would inhibit the process of protein folding up because bacteria secrete a lot of proteins or have a lot of proteins in the cell surface that are very important for killing people or killing organisms that is stop the bacteria from making those sulfide bones in their proteins then you would be stopping the bacteria from making things that are very important for them and causing disease as a result of that just in the last sort of three or four years we've ended up with some nice genetic approaches that allow us to readily look for antibiotics that inhibit the process so we're now in the something something i never imagined i would do because based that would use this mechanism but would you also have a problem with mutations with with the you know with the any biotics would that that's the problem to a lot of the antibiotics that exist so people are talking about using combinations of antibiotics because then it's harder for them to resist two very different antibiotics but this one this is also a different approach in that it it doesn't necessarily stop the growth of the bacteria in every case yeah but it prevents the bacteria from producing these toxic proteins for humans or whatever they're inventing  any case now i'd like to go to you were so well known as an activist to go back to the one nine hundred sixty nine here when you announced that the isolation of the gene and it was a very big deal because of something you did at that time in cautioning where this could go and i'd like to talk about reaction why you did that and the reaction to it  i think a lot of it was the reason we called this press conference and not only talked about the work we've done but also for the second part of the press conference talked about our concerns reflected the fact that  s society and many other countries were in turmoil over for instance the vietnam more than in the united states other issues civil rights etc demonstrations in the streets all the time consider and also that was influencing at least some scientists who were speaking out it largely began with scientists who were concerned about testing of atomic a portent because we felt there was an issue related to the government in the way it was what kind of science it was funding and what it was using the science for and in many cases we thought it wasn't for such good purposes yeah so what was the reaction to that within the scientific community so some scientists were behind you know and certainly in this area i think a think we talked about before that the union of concerned scientists started up then a number i think maybe physicians for social responsibility of may have a number of these groups of professionals that were very worried about where their scientific efforts might lead inadvertently that was not their their aim but in the academe when you really got into this the next move was a little you know more and more activists not just speaking it was not a good thing to do because it might make science the bad and that might lead to cutting back on funding of science which i found very dismaying that yes yes you're right about those things  but you're going to cause problems for the development of science so it's more sort of self interest issues but there were a lot of younger sides as who were becoming involved yeah at that time yeah for that that was the first really the first thing i ever got involved in that was political but also was political connected to science and other students that that year of nine hundred sixty nine at mit it held a big strike and h about some of the kinds of things that mit was doing with what the development of military weapons that we that's the thing is we associate this much more with students than with say faculty but in that time there was a lot of faculty upheaval  and support for these concerns also i think right i'd like to go back for just a minute here you were you were concerned about the misuse of genetics in this case was grounded i think in history in the united states and elsewhere in the world about the misuse of inheritance can you tell us anything about the nine you know and i'm thinking men in this country and also in that period when you're what you're in the sixty's and seventy's the overt racism that was scientifically  presented at the time can you tell us about it when we called the press conference actually i don't think we were that aware of the word to some extent but what happened was once you get public you have to explain what you're saying we were worried i think at the time about the possibility of them taking genes human genes and engineering humans for various negative purposes but very quickly i realized i had to know more about what but the hell i was talking about and so i started to read a lot and discovered very quickly the the history of the movement in the united states which began in the beginning of the twentieth century and spread to many countries of coding and including germany and italy but what happened in the united states in the early part of the twentieth century was you janet movement which included the support of many scientists at the time who really believed in the theories that were being put out that they were people with inferior genes and people with superior genes obviously the people who are making a lot of money and richard must have disappeared actually that was when the ones who are making so much money don't and so they got they were successful at getting a number of different research use quotes because it wasn't good research in that field of genetics and human behavior was done in the united states and passed on again was provided the in other countries are huge and do you think that has anything to do with our immigrant history they cuz a lot of that was imposed on these very poor immigrants that were met with i his his overt racism and about it was all doctored up with the i q test to cover that brought it back maybe people being a more aware of it just what this is is going on and it's still with us obviously it's still that still with us i think you wrote maybe about pellagra also which was a wonderful example of how this misuse could come about but that's  that we have a disease so there was a debate that went to that was the genetics versus environment debate there was a i've forgotten the somebody goldberger i forget which side  that one of the scientists argue that it was genetic and these were genetically defective people right and the other argued with with evidence because he changed people's diet and things improved genetics the vase and genetics were discovered at the very beginning of the twentieth century in a way it's very much like the year after the human genome was sequenced in two thousand when everyone was talking about yes and that was happening back then yeah to be fair to the geneticists of the time eventually kind of very much too late they realize we're disick this is going too far these genetic arguments are wrong  and we don't support them but it was well after all these laws have been school here's one this is very widespread now i think as you say everybody's invoking genes for i don't know if you have a hangnail because of genes but that but the other thing is that you pinned and i would like to know if it's widespread in the genetic science community is you tackle things like sociobiology and what's the other one evolutionary sort of  or other tell us about that would you and just like to know if if if other geneticists are worried about this too worried about the that it has become very fashion sociobiology i wasn't really aware that it was growing field and so the first time i heard of it was opening up the new york times one morning in one thousand nine hundred seventy five and seeing this front page articles saying we have a new science which explains everything science and everything yet and i was kind of sound and called up a friend of mine who is an evolutionary biologist richard the want and i said well what is this evolution has selected for males and females to be played very details and they can't function in science or or business and things like that that racism is innate and on  that there was there was no really strong basis for this extraordinary front page story in the new york times and we got together a group of people a lot of from different fields anthropology biology paleontology genetics it's interim and we spent a summer reading the book to find out what housing say that said we eventually wrote a critique that caused quite a stir because we found it then there are interesting things that came out of it one of wilson's former students was hooman anthropologists who studied monkey behavior and she published a book which is kind of extraordinary i think it's really quite interesting to read because she looked at the conclusions that were drawn by studies of male primatologists versus female primatologists and what she concluded was that the males simply work and it was just such a strong example of how that's it's a problem when you're dealing with so few men social behavior to abstract yourself and be truly objective about what's what you're observing right i hope though that geneticists like you will get out there and sort of shake things up a little bit because it's very easy and there's a there are couple of new books out we were talking about one of them just recently we're back to this thing first of all races matter and there are these distinctions and i thought we were through with this a long time ago but it's back so hope will get out there and get vocal again i would like to ask you about the recombinant d n a a little bit too because that also has led that's been a really difficult thing first what is it and why were you worried about it when the recombinant it's an interesting social history of scientists this is like around hundred seventy five seventy four seventy from scientists started to make genes from different places and put them into bacteria and for example they were taking genes from cancer viruses and expressing them in the bacterium ico a lie and a researcher was at a conference sort of probably announcing that he was doing this wonderful work and now we're going to be able to study cancer which in a way that it isn't full when a lot of people stood up and said you shouldn't be doing that without the you may be spreading cancer genes around in ways you don't want to do by doing this and paul berg was a scientist who was laboratory was doing this work at stanford university and he actually went along and agreed that this was of concern and one should start to look at it more carefully and to spend some time and stop the research until you have really worked this out and have reason to think that it is good reason to think that it's not going to be dangerous the thing that concerned me was more related to my nine hundred sixty six nine hundred sixty nine press conference because now i was worried about the manipulation of human genes and the possibility of home and in relating the human genome and at that point in my life although i've changed my view of things i felt that this research it shouldn't be done because given the history we've we've not used genetics in a beneficial way oh and there's some dangers here i think a lot of the discussion of the time was really about the health hazards whether you were spreading cancer genes or other kinds and eventually that got kind of settled there were committees set up at the national institutes of health that product things but again it it started in the late one nine hundred eighty s along with beginning to support scientific research also put a fair amount of money into examining the potential social health or health hazards of the research  so that has changed a bit so that you know i've been very critical of scientists in the past but there is some degree of progress sometimes it's just window dressing when they do things like that but there's still there's an idea now that you have to anticipate the consequences of your work for instance there's a new field apparently new fuel called synthetic biology s doing very similar things become a d n a does but in issues by younger scientists and people who are politicized by that era i think has had an influence not that not to say that things are perfect by any means i think that there are still serious problems i i think right now there's a little concerned like certain industries intruding a great deal in a lot of this research and they start getting pressured because of funding and so forth you know to deliver some other kind of product that you may initially object but that there is that pressure i guess maybe that's also the military  there's an interesting article in science or nature magazine maybe last your a couple of years ago a debate between two scientists about whether it was ethical to take grants from the  maybe that people are more conscious of you know it's that and the other thing that shifts that maybe is this funding issue which pressures perhaps in young scientists in particular that they don't have as many options you know to say in any case i cover what you are doing now in terms of your work on commuting communicating science to the public and of working with students your issues and the students came to me and said we really should be getting much more that we'd like to have a whole course and we'll if you'll help us we will organize and lead the sessions so they the students actually led the sessions in the first year or something but then as time went by we ended up doing another professor not from the department and up doing doing all the sessions ourselves and that now covers a whole range and we look at contemporary research in these areas because these kinds of things so go on and make a splash we talk about science and more time go over the career of j robert robert  yeah and that's just a fascinating story of the atomic scientists and the mixed feelings they had about what they were doing so which would things that influenced me actually when i was pretty young because was very famous and well known back and because of and he had a real content and the conscience hurt him i mean he got removed from the committee that was supervising it because of his concerns about how how atomic energy was going to be used and i think that's an interesting example to see would cite an example of a side to assume thought about these issues yes  so the core still runs this correct and you are also engaged beyond that but i would like to put on the event page on your event page then i'll make sure if i don't have it there now the the name of the course but it sounds like one of those courses that should be on life for the whole world because i think a lot of people would really like having this and not just students in the university but the public at large you know the mit and harvard online course thing would be just just great but in any case you also are engaged with another group in terms of putting out information for people can you tell us briefly about that and the on a website where we've started to collect courses like this from around the country and cataloguing them on that putting them on the website so that people can access these courses my problem is finding other scientists who can get funding courses that deal with many of the issues i am with i but overwhelmingly bit more from sociology that apologist and history of science rangle not that there aren't some from from side to so so  we're developing that that as a place and hopefully kalamazoo has a center called the center for for social justice leadership and they're interested in working with us to really spread the word more about these kinds of courses and to push for its being something ideal the university that scientists should be in addition to their science in the science courses they should be getting exposure to what it means to be scientists in terms of the potential social consequences in your science itself or in your be very interested tonight we have a group of students from a local college and i know that they're eager to ask to talk with you and ask me questions and so forth so i am sorry that i had to end there i could talk about this all night it's very interesting and i really appreciate your talking with us you're coming here and talking with us and i will now pull back and let you talk with the people in the audience here ok you're optimistic compared to what it was like in may sixty nine that there are these ethics committees that are tied to synthetic biology for instance right at the outset but would you agree that it's also potentially much there's a need so first of all i may have sounded optimistic but i very much agree with what you're saying it's overwhelming how fast things are progressing and how hard it is to keep up with them at the time there's still a sector have to be sector of the scientific community that really doesn't believe in it and i found this on the human genome project where they talk about we don't need philosophers or other people telling us what to do we know what to do and i think that's a big problem in it that the development of ethics or whatever you want to call it or concerns about the boat potential dangers of of  research should involve people other than just some had just talking to themselves and i think that happens too often so yes i'm optimistic because it was neal it was not all when i started in science there was no discussion at all of these issues and it's that's changed a lot so that's hopefully will expend some of it do you want to respond to that or well i just i just caveman figured out how to run a whole pack of mammoth off collections that are just hunting one of the time and they found this great solution to find a source of food but they also lay down the food i think got and this is this idea of a progress ra could be what we are all sort of in the middle of all the time no down the forefront of you know challenging that looking for checks and balances and i wonder sometimes even teaching in this program you know where things might go where are the checks and balances and typically these things come down to politics right so whether the republicans are in office of the democrats or in office there's going to be different ethics boards are kind of declaring what our values are in the united states and it's a scary situation and i wonder what you foresee with people like craig venter's synthesizing or i don't know i to me the biggest problem today is global warming and that's where i think the issues you raising are really ut it's to develop kangal products and drugs and things in eastern bacteria or something in a very rapid production process it without synthetic biology you couldn't really do so there's this wonderful potential for bioengineering but the result is thank you all so very slow are you people are going to do the wrong thing and the question is where our checks and balances have that's part of it ethics sections have become part of professional society meeting sometimes that may not be terribly meaningful and i've never had the time to look at what's happening with synthetic biologist i think that if like if people were to make to alter human genes in order to get more favorable characteristics one that eventually narrow down the differences between people would that affect evolution in a way less likely to be able to adapt to use like a change and one of the big problems that people talk about in that case is that it's going to cost money to do this kind of thing and who will be able to afford it i mean i guess if the government decided that they would change everyone genetically it could happen but i don't think that's going to happen and what people worry about is that it will in fact separate people more and more if it's a little bit to me talking about science fiction because for instance at this point there's no reason to think one is going to be able to introduce genes into people that will affect intelligence etc or a lot of other issues that people talk about it there it's hard enough for people but one of the big failures of genetics recently is that all of the arguments that came out of particularly out of twin studies which people like arthur jensen carried out which said that zero i q is highly genetic and that actually give a figure take the percent genetic when people have gone to look for genes basically they haven't found them they found very very rare things that have very small effects and don't at all add up to the kinds of things that have been claimed for twin studies so i think we're in an era where geneticists are following the work that's been done in twin studies on genetics which has some very serious flaws and the discovering that maybe the genes that supposedly existed for criminality or intelligence etc simply don't exist that's not to say that there's no genetic effects on people's behavior but i think there are blanket kind of conclusions that were made by the field of behavior genetics about the overall intelligence and  genetic basis so earlier you were talking about how the stanford university scientists ended up studying the genes and putting them into eagle eye do you really think that the cancer genes would end up spreading much faster or do you think something much worse could have particularly worried about it because i felt that you're actually probably causing a problem for the bacteria that probably won't grow as well when they have extra genes in them from other  organisms nevertheless people did worry that somehow if these experiments were always done with the bacteria e coli which is a big inhabitant of the human gut so people in general have a coal in them and could be infected with an e coli which becomes part of their gut it's possible that the cancer genes could be released and somehow integrated into a chromosome in effect the potential for cancer in individuals that i didn't think that scenario was very likely was that was that the question you're asking but it was worth pursuing to make first of all make people feel better about it now this kind of research has been going on for decades and there's no indication that anything like that has ever happened with any of the  the bacteria there in made in there are regulations developed that allowed that allowed want to pursue the research if it was done under very strict conditions where the bacteria was unlikely to escape well it's got out of whack but mainly heart of twin studies are studies that are not contemporary gene hunting studies so if you look at the literature now that there are there were a lot of really successes with diseases that have straightforward clear inheritance like sickle cell anemia cystic fibrosis etc etc and you've read all the time all these discoveries but when they go they were doing something wrong they're not saying well maybe we maybe in fact there aren't that environment plays a more important role than we thought which surprises me i just think people would and i think it's partly based on the fact people people doing this genetics for d n a molecular biologists don't read the twin studies they just read their conclusions and take take it on faith that the genetic arguments made by