One may also have a case where not only because of the means of inquiry but perhaps even because of the ends of inquiry one may judge certain lines of research inadmissible. In human experimentation, a point may be reached where certain research strategies become inadmissible because they require inadmissible experiments. A case in point is genetic research, when it seeks to determine, for instance, whether human cloning is possible, or whether there can be improvement of the human type by genetic surgery; that is, modifying the gene composition in reproductive cells. At least one try at cloning, and probably many more than one, ending in producing a genetically-ordered individual, is necessary to find out. The deed eventually to be decided upon in the light of knowledge is already committed in the night of ignorance, but the first clone or genetic freak experimentally produced is as real and definitive as any individual brought forth into the world. Even discounting the overwhelming risk of beginning with monstrosities before the technique is perfected, and without the moral freedom of automotive engineering to scratch the failures or to recall them to the factory for repair, there is simply no way to experiment on the unborn. They are non-consenting by definition. For this reason alone the whole venture is ethically unsound.

Having said that, one can turn to the goal itself, apart from the inadmissible experiments it requires.

One may argue-and I would be willing to argue, but it would take much too long-that the goal itself may raise such grave doubts about whether it should be done at all that one may say this line of research should be closed. There are eager biologists who want to pursue it and it would certainly not be prevented by any disapproval or censure of peer groups. There is no legislation on the books to protect the unborn future individual.

CAPRON. When I found myself for a moment being grouped with Gerard Piel-well, I guess in most cases I would be very complimented. But since he was being identified with the absolute sovereignty of science, I shuddered that what I had said had somehow been so inarticulate. But I found that obviously there was subliminal education going on, because what I had regarded as rather a ringing call for public participation in decisions about science was exactly what I heard you reiterating. I honestly agree with that. The question of enforcement, since I was instructed to keep the remarks rather brief, I leave 'til tomorrow.

My comments were limited to identification of important scientific discoveries. Your further comments though, and the comments of Robert Sinsheimer, raised the question of whether or not in most cases it is the knowledge that is feared. The example that Gerard Piel gave of research on heritability of intelligence, and particularly a racial link, would strike me as an example of a case in which the results of an experiment, particularly one which it was feared was improperly conducted, would in themselves be potentially very pernicious.

Aside from that, I don't think it is knowledge that is feared, but the uses of that knowledge. And here I think it is our uncertainty about our ability to control the uses to which knowledge will be put once it is developed that threatens the freedom of the scientist. The concern is, since we can't stop sometime later in the process, that we've got to control the things which the scientist is going to seek.

MORISON. Are you taking a position on that?

CAPRON. I think we will find the idea that what can be done will be done is a false notion. As people concerned with public policy, the work we should engage in during this conference is seeing whether or not we can agree, by looking at cases, that stops can be put to the use of knowledge when that use is inappropriate or dangerous to society. I disagree with what I understood Robert Sinsheimer to be saying: that not only are we uncertain about our ability to do that but that we really shouldn't be doing that because the ability to stop the uses threatens the freedom in which a scientist has to work. I think it's our feared inability to stop that threatens the scientist, and that scientists should join with others in finding ways to control the uses to which knowledge is put, because that will protect their freedom to search widely.

PIEL. I mean to maintain my polar position here, and to say that I regard the sovereignty and independence of the scientist as an extension of my own independence and sovereignty as a citizen. Any qualification of it threatens me, and I think it threatens everybody here. The answers to the questions we are faced with here are to be found through the extension of the pragmatic and decent and humane procedures and methods that have been developed in the scientific community, about which the public at large and our political apparatus is just beginning to learn. While it is easy to conjure up the notion of the experiment on the clone, that would only occur to Frederick William the First with his 6'7" Potsdam guards. I bet he would have loved to have clones of them; that's the kind of political order and the kind of human being to which that proposition would occur.

The moral meaning of science in our society is one that says we work differently. I agree that there are horrendous possibilities. We must rely on building from that base of respect for the independence and sovereignty of the individual inquiring human being. Galileo got locked up for mucking around in the ends of knowledge, and we're going to face more questions like that in our time. They already really shake our society. What I think we're confronted with here is the fact that because of what society knows scientists know, the old absolutes and the old arrangements under which people found their security and their peace of mind are missing. We must agree to a new approach to life which insists that there aren't any absolute answers, that knowledge is tentative, and that values are going to change as our knowledge increases.

In Asilomar, we have an example of how the moral responsibility of scientists awoke in them instantly all across the world. In every lab where this kind of work was going on, the same kinds of questions occurred to the same kinds of decent people, and they met to do something about it. Maybe they didn't have the full answer in the way they did it, but the model they gave us and the one that comes out of the history of science is the one we should be working with, not the discovery of some way in which some external authority is going to be imposed.

SINSHEIMER, Alexander Capron defined the issue very clearly: whether the controls should be imposed at the level of inquiry or at the level of the use of the inquiry. But the point I was trying to make

was that I can envision certain kinds of research which, once the knowledge was obtained, would require social controls of a very iniquitous nature far out of proportion to any benefit the knowledge would provide to society. In such a case, it would seem to me to be the course of wisdom to try to cut it off at the first level rather than the second.

HELLEGERS. The question Hans Jonas begs is the one I tried to raise this afternoon, the distinction between those who would ethically oppose experiments deontologically and those who would oppose them teleolgically. Hans Jonas is a strong deontologist.

What seems to me important is Alexander Capron's comment about bioethicists. I am struck by the fact that more than 60 of us were invited to this conference, but Hans Jonas is going to be the only profsional ethicist to speak, the only one. I attended a two-day forum of the National Academy of Sciences on the same issue at which no ethicist spoke. I was surprised by your comment that these ideas would be esoteric, because they seemed to me to go precisely to the heart of the question. The ethicist formulates the questions to be addressed so much more sharply than most scientists. I'm surprised that you would have thought that there was no place in the final solution for a bioethicist.

CAPRON. That's precisely what I said. "Bioethicist" is the term that has now come to encompass many people like myself. I do not call myself an ethicist, but I get called upon to participate as a "bioethicist," as do people who are theologians, people who are public policy analysts, people who are economists, and others. I'm using the term in that way; if you think it's inappropriate, it's only descriptive. But what I said is that they may be very, very useful in the process of identifying the issues. That is different from calling them in-as has happened time after time-under this rubric of bioethics, to give the answers as though they are somehow going to be matched up against the scientists and have a head-on collison, like trial by combat, and the result will be a public policy decision. That's what I was objecting to; the idea that this is a process for which we, for instance, at Airlie House would decide, rather than much more broadly-based, slightly less well-informed public bodies.

HELLEGERS. Well then, let me respond that my great fear is that you and I are called bioethicists when we have no right to practice ethics. I have yet to meet an ethicist who alleges that he has the solution. He is the man who asks the questions. All sorts of people are practicing without a license, and giving answers ethicists would never give.

CAPRON. I don't disagree with you at all. I disavow the term whenever it's applied to me. But I think it is the rubric which is applied in this area.

GAYLIN. Hans Jonas, you said at one point that the scientist must be responsible not just for the intention of his theoretical research but also for its application. I would like to ask you the same question you put to Alexander Capron. Since it is the nature of fundamental research to lead to all sorts of intriguing serendipitous results—indeed, some of the greatest benefits of science-how in the world do you expect accountability? Do you really mean the scientist is accountable for applications of his work beyond any possible expectation of anticipation? Second, for Gerard Piel, I'm really confused by your statement, and

I want you to clarify it. If I understood what you said, it was that in an evil and lunatic society, scientists do lunatic things, but that in a good and moral society we can depend on the good will and sanity of the scientific community. Now I would like to know whether you would say the same thing to distinguish the business community in a lunatic environment from the business community in a moral one? I presume you define our society as moral. I must say I was mystified by your use of the term "sovereign." I'm aware that the First Amendment covers sovereignty of ideas, but not of action. Couldn't you then extend your concept of sovereignty to the business community, the commercial enterprise, manufacturing, law, medicine, engineering, drug manufacturing?

JONAS. How can the scientist be accountable when the results of his basic research could not have been anticipated? For instance, the nuclear scientists, are they responsible for the atomic bomb? The question is, how basic is the research? We can hardly make the discoverers of classical mechanics, including Galileo and Newton, responsible for the use that has been made of that kind of mechanics. I was much more thinking of scientific projects which have in them a certain direction toward particular practices. This is a matter of degree. In the example I gave about biological engineering, the scientist himself will have in mind in doing his research certain things that are predictable.

MORISON. To be specific, would you have stopped Gurdon from doing the original experiment on the frog, where he took the somatic nucleus and put it into the frog egg? Would you have stopped that because sometime somebody might do it in a man?

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JONAS. No, but there is then a really critical step from there into the region where human genetics and human cloning becomes a kind of vision.

MORISON. Then you and Alexander Capron are together on this, that the question is where you draw the line and how you do it? JONAS. YES.

PIEL. I make this distinction: that our freedom, when we seek our personal ends, is governed by the Fifth Amendment and the due process clause. We, as sovereign governors of a self-governing society, are also the governed citizens thereof. So long as we are seeking private ends, we are properly subject to public regulation. That applies to the corporation and all those other mischievous fellows you've spoken of. Inquiry is another matter. Inquiry is a sovereign process. It is by the increase of human understanding that we shape the ends of society and make human purpose-and incidentally, because the kind of knowledge we're talking about here is useful knowledge, provide the means for attainment of those ends. And there I say that the free

John Gurdon, an Oxford biologist, did his work-known popularly as cloning-with an African horned toad, a creature known for its regeneration capacities. Radiation was used to destroy the nucleus of an egg cell, and that nucleus was replaced with one from an ordinary body cell, which had a complete chromosome complement. He assumed that all body cell nuclei contained the latent potential for reproduction of a differentiated, multicellular adult, and that the new cell would be equivalent to a fertilized egg and therefore capable of producing an adult form. The resulting embryos did in fact achieve the swimming tadpole stage of development. It is thus theoretically possible to produce a genetically identical copy of any organism with this technique, although to date most of this: work has been done on plants. Partly for technical reasons, it has not yet been successfully achieved in mammals, including Homo sapiens. See J. B. Gurdon, and R. A. Lasky The transplantation of nuclei from single cultured cells inte enucleate frogs' eggs. Journal of Embryologic and Experimental Morphology, vol. 24, 1970, p. 227.

dom of the citizen pursuing the public welfare and concerned with the ends and the purposes of government and the operations of government is absolute. I disagree strongly with Justice Holmes, who finally wound up disagreeing with himself when he balanced national security against individual liberty. There is this classical business of the collision of absolutes and what marvelous and difficult kinds of problems that gives us. It doesn't give me any problem at all, because government is subject to the sovereignty of the citizenry. I say that science requires the extension of that, and it's the most sovereign enterprise of all.

Now we come to how you do it in the real world. I think it's to be attained by the same kind of adjustment of pragmatic institutions that we find in the peer review group, where the model of the tactical decision becomes broadened to take on the strategic decision. We can go beyond that to include still larger elements in the social order. say that the principle we must bear in mind in doing so is the sovereign principle of freedom of inquiry. I'm not bothered at all by Hans Jonas' problem of the Potsdam guards. That's not the kind of proposition that arises in any natural and decent way. We are talking about a moral society. This is. And the scientific enterprise is a moral enterprise.

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CAPRON. I think it is true that the First Amendment may give protection to the thoughts and communications of scientists. But the Fifth Amendment does not give any protection to him when he claims he is serving the public ends; indeed, the Fifth Amendment places limitations on state action, not on individual action.

LAURA NADER. I'd like to raise two questions, one addressed to Robert Sinsheimer and the second addressed to Alexander Capron. The first has to do with freedom and the social organization of the scientific workplace. I'm really impressed that whenever I hear scientists talking about scientific freedom and freedom of inquiry, they're always talking on the ideal level about what should be in order that science should operate. I am very concerned, as I watch scientific workplaces, such as for example the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, that with increased scarcity people are really coming out in their underwear. We've got to begin to realize that scientists are employees now. They work for laboratories, they work for departments in universities, they have the fears of employees, they are censored like employees.

Most of these organizations are shaped like a pyramid, and the people who have the freedom of inquiry, who decide where inquiry should go, are at the top of that pyramid. If you want to talk about freedom of inquiry in the scientific community, you're talking mainly about the three percent of the scientific community that have it and that decide it for the rest. The second question has to do with accountability.

CAPRON. I think people are listening for the first question.

NADER. Well, what I'm asking Robert Sinsheimer here is, do you think scientists have the freedom Gerard Piel described?

SINSHEIMER. I don't know how the radiation laboratory at Berkeley works. I do know that I'm chairman of the Division of Biology at Cal Tech, and if that's a hierarchical organization it's been concealed