In this episode, we interview Dr. Laurie Zoloth, the Margaret E. Burton Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and EBRC Council Member. We ask Dr. Zoloth how moral philosophy can address ethical dilemmas in an uncertain world. Along the way, we delve into issues like gene drives and germline editing, and we speak about the importance of integrity, fidelity, and solidarity for scientists.
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
In this episode, we interview Dr. Laurie Zoloth, the Margaret E. Burton Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and EBRC Council Member. We ask Dr. Zoloth how moral philosophy can address ethical dilemmas in an uncertain world. Along the way, we delve into issues like gene drives and germline editing, and we speak about the importance of integrity, fidelity, and solidarity for scientists.
For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
Hello EBRC and translation listeners. This is Andrew Hunt, editor of this episode. This conversation with Dr. Laurie Zoloth was recorded in December of 2020. Part of the conversation references the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has evolved slightly over the past few months. We wanted to give you a quick heads up since some of the comments may now feel out of date. It's a fascinating conversation and we really hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to EBRC and Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. We're your hosts for this episode, Katherine Brink and Adam Silverman. I'm Katherine Brink, a graduate student in Jeff Taber's lab at Rice University. And I'm Adam Silverman, a graduate student at Northwestern University in the Jewett and Lux Labs. This episode, our guest is Dr. Laurie Zoloth, the Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where she also serves as the senior advisor to the provost. Dr. Zoloth has been the president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She has served on a number of federal advisory boards for bioethics and also serves as a council member for the EBRC. Dr. Zoloth has a doctorate in social ethics as well as master's degrees in Jewish studies and English. She's a leading scholar in the fields of moral philosophy and synthetic biology. Dr. Zoloth, we're excited to have you join us today. I'm excited to be here. I love podcasts. This will be fun. And just to kick us off, maybe broadly speaking, could you describe for our listeners your areas of research? Well, in general, I'm interested in social ethics, which is the study and research around the question, what is the right act and what makes it so? And in answering that question, I draw on traditional sources in religion, texts, scriptural texts, commentary texts, historical texts, practices, and also the long history of moral philosophy, which is entwined with religious thought for much of its history, but diverges in modernity. So we have a formal apparatus that is the study of bioethics, which is normally what you encounter when you're thinking about human practices in synthetic biology or engineering biology. I've been interested in emerging technology for about 20 years, thinking about what ontological issues it raises, because those, of course, are of interest to philosophers, and also on what moral issues, what issues about the self and other are invoked by the creation of new entities. So those things are interesting to me. My broadest concern is the issue of social justice. And so what is attractive to me about this particular field, about engineering biology, is unlike some of the applications of, say, CRISPR in medicine, where we make decisions on a patient-by-patient basis. Important, but really at the sort of the nether frontier of medicine, where bioethics has looked at them, at odd or unusual cases, synthetic biology holds the promise of changing the world at a population level scale, really addressing the problems of the poor, things like clean water, things like energy that doesn't pollute, large diseases like malaria, which really yield to public health measures at a population scale. So I'm interested in justice applications of new technology, not just for the cruel factor, but for the justice factor that engineering biology captures. And because it's cousin to civil engineering, which really did aim to reshape the world for the benefit of human beings. So digging a little bit more into your academic history, how did you come across synthetic biology? How were you drawn to this field? I know you mentioned that you're curious about its implications for social justice and really interested in that, but you didn't start out looking at synthetic biology. So how did you become interested in the context of your academic studies? So in the year 2001, I believe, I was asked by the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute to come and present on the ethics, ethical implications of stem cell research, which was just emerging at that time. And I had just written with colleagues, a group of colleagues, an article about Geron's funding and support for Jamie Thompson's work on the early embryonic stem cell research. And I was, we had written about this and several months later, HHMI asked me to come, there was a group of us that were asked to come and present about this, about the ethical issues in going forward with embryo research. And I presented and it was intriguing for both for me and for the HHMI as well. And they established at that point an ethics advisory board. And I became the chair of the ethics advisory board and some of my colleagues and I then worked for the next seven years attending, I attended all the meetings, HHMI meetings and listened to all the great new science that was coming forward at that time. So it's 2001 to 2008. And during that time, I met colleagues from UC Berkeley, and they invited me to come and come and see what they were up to in more detail. Now I'm, I lived in Berkeley for 30 years. I always say yes to an invitation to Berkeley. I was delighted to come. And I met at that bad point, Tom J. Keasley, who invited me into his lab and showed me the prototype of the Artemisia look and held up these little prototype pills and said 75 cents and I can cure malaria. Now that caught my attention immediately because of course malaria up until COVID was one of the most horrifying diseases and the disease that really affects just the poorest people in our world, mostly children under five. And at that time, I thought the statistic of a child dying every two minutes was appalling. After COVID, we've become inured to such catastrophic death rates tragically. But the thought that you could intervene in malaria and create this interesting mix of ancient Chinese wormwood and really interesting new science, that was very intriguing to me. And so they had had their first meeting and then I was asked to speak at Symbio 2.0 about the ethical invitations. And that meant I kept getting invited back and kept finding some of the interesting things, for instance, nitrogen fixation projects that were, again, really focused on addressing the problems and developing, on addressing problems that confront poor people. So while much of my field went purely chasing after brain transplants, you know, or long distance fMRIs or something, I was really interested in synthetic biology, engineering biology. How could you engineer the natural world to be a place that was created, was a place of human flourishing and other creatures flourishing as well. And there is a lot of interesting people involved in the work, interesting to talk to and had interesting, landish in a good way ideas. And I liked that. That was very, it created a thoughtful discussion. We were able to have very interesting and thoughtful discussions through the many years since. What have been some of your favorite discussions with people in the synthetic biology community or any particularly crazy ideas? So many. The nature, what's really interesting to me is this, the way that science understands the world, the all that is other, all that is non-self, is to take it apart. And so the image is sort of like, like Silicon Valley guys in a garage with all the pieces laid out before them. So the world is understood, and this is just characters of science, the epistemology of science. The way you understand something is you break it down to its smallest possible parts. And then you'll really know because you've gotten to whatever its essence is, which is this deconstructed self. And of course, theology and philosophy never sees things that way, with holes. And so the specter of the disembodied, disassociated reality is not as compelling to us as it is to some of the science. It doesn't seem to us any more true. In fact, it seems somewhat less true because it needs a pattern, it needs an organizational structure, it needs meaning. So there's no meaning in the deconstructed parts. And oftentimes, for me, I'm interested always in what does this mean? Why is this so? And of course, in science, that's a just-so story. We can't know that. We can know how, but never why. And here I am thinking about why. We've had some interesting conversations about that. I've just finished, actually, a piece about uncertainty because I came to learn through these discussions that much of the world is undiscovered, is unknown. I remember once after there was a flush of excitement in the first few years of synthetic biology. And then there was, I think it was in bio four or something. I think it was through Andy got up and said, you know, biology is very messy. And it doesn't look like our paradigm. It's difficult in a way that's complicated and irrational. They said the deep irrationality of biological systems is really surprising, but not at all to a philosopher who tended to see things differently. It really raised, for me, really interesting questions that I wanted to interrogate further about, do you really, really know? How can you really, really know in the frailty of examining the future? These are very rich discussions about epistemological questions as well as methodological questions. How would you go about finding it? Ethics focuses very much on assessments of the future and outcomes. In America, that we do a risk benefit analysis. We love that idea. It has an actuarial quality that Americans like so much money and things adding up in the continent and the EU. They love this precautionary principle. And so the cautionary principles often stands in front of advantages in the way the risk benefit does for Americans. And I've come to see that both of those are wrong. Both of those are frail and frail approximations of the real deep uncertainty that we face, which is that you can't really know the outcomes. You can't total up the risks and benefits because you can't really know all the risks. And you can't really precautionary your way out of it because where you stand is unstable as well. Where you stand is a place. It's not safety. So everything shifts around you in this way. And so then what might come to your rescue, what will come to your rescue is, of course, ethics, which doesn't have that unstable quality. It has this enduring quality because it doesn't imagine it can control the future or even change the future. It imagines the kind of humans you want to be as you go into the future. So that's been the conversations that led to this are been interesting to me. Can I ask maybe, I think this is a good segue. We don't have a good idea of what the future is going to look like. And this challenges a lot of big projects in synthetic biology, something like a gene drive or something that would have drastic environmental applications. So what is the ethical way of confronting something like that? Is it getting patient consent and figuring out the best way to do that on a population scale or is it something deeper? So because I'm working on just finishing right now a book on gene drives when I'm writing the last chapter and I'm thinking about that question, I don't I think consent, I think the normal tools we have for thinking about ethical decision making are extremely limited and they're charmingly anthropological in character. They're descriptive of how people might act. And then we have this construct of consent and community engagement discussion, which people will try over and over again not to be scientists telling communities what to think. But whenever communities come up with their own ideas and don't really want something, we think of that as a huge problem. So we're not really interested. Otherwise, we wouldn't care about vaccines or something like we're seeing right now the frailty of consent as we try to roll out a vaccine program, which we know we the collective intellect science and humanities scholars intellect, we know this is the right answer. It's not even a question. Yes, get vaccinated. But the community may not want to consent. So then they're so and that that drama is really beneath any other discussions of consent that the possibility of that same thing happening is should be very alive for scientists, community consent may not work well. It may it just may not in part because there's such a fierce anti science spirit abroad in the land that is taken hold of people or populations worldwide. And what do you do when you're confronted with a bad idea? Now, you could say, well, that's what it looks like if you don't fund public education for two generations. Then don't be surprised. Right. But what's really interesting to me is consent is the limits of consent have to be faced really clearly because they're not they're not the answer. I know we end every paper in bioethics we're saying and then we need to we need to get community consent, but it's not it's not adequate. So that's why I especially something like gene drives, which I think about a lot, which will which are designed to affect huge populations as possible, larger, the better they work, the larger population they would affect and are designed to alter ecosystems and designed to be out of control, by definition. So there's two ways to think about this one way to compare it with things we've already done. So we have, we know that that eliminating all mosquitoes in an area, even if we killed the entire species, probably wouldn't alter things all that much. And why do I know this? Because the the Works Progress Administration and the Roosevelt era use DDT, World War Two use DDT and sprayed highly toxic chemicals over every inch of land in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee, and knocked out many generations of insects, not only mosquitoes, but every living thing, creeping crawling thing and probably baby mammals as well. And those colleges have bounced back and mosquitoes have bounced back without, of course, the parasite. So it ended up not being a great intervention. But it was an intervention that one, related malaria from the American South took until 1956 to do this. But that's how they did it. And two, mosquitoes came back with plenty of mosquitoes in Louisiana and Mississippi. So, so we know that the ecosystems can take the elimination of species even clumsily done. The other thing is, is every year, the American government flies over, I believe it's the isthmus of Panama, but it might be further north now, and drops sterilized male flesh eating worms from airplanes, remarkably enough in huge numbers to defeat the the progress of flesh eating worms in the United States. Now, no one's no one's worried about that. There's no posters about that's a bad idea, because they have a flesh eating worms and just so unattractive. So what happens and it's a huge intervention and a very clumsy intervention. And that's the non specific intervention that's happening. Lord knows what else is going on. Well, no one's ever really asked or done a study. So compared to either of those interventions, a gene drive which is following every single elaborately constructed stricture that the E can set up, for instance, you know, small iterative steps seems much less impactful. And even if we're to go wrong in some way, the way that it could go wrong seems like that would crash and the project would fail rather than the world would be transformed. Because if other species were going to take up the burden of carrying malaria or something worse, that would have happened many millions of years ago when when the very complicated apparatus of malaria, mosquitoes, parasite was was began to evolve. It's a very tricky disease of evolution. So, but I can't can I tell you for sure? Now, here's the third big thing. No, honestly, I don't think we should try to properly I can talk you into convincing you into the fact that it's probably okay. Notice my risk benefit American risk benefit discourse here where I tried to lower the risk, right? And of course, the benefit of not having malaria, what a great thing. That's really not what ultimately matters. What ultimately matters is philosophers to say no, I can't predict the future. But what I can do is say, in any future, you'll have to promise not to abandon the project. So for any future, anything you do, any project you take on any enterprise you're doing in science, any intervention you're doing, you you have to think about what sort of scientists you want to be. And what you can promise is the principle of fidelity. And the principle of fidelity often not talked about very, very interesting recent Greek idea that you should be faithful to your work and not abandon the subjects of your work be they the African environment that you're losing the June drive on the African communities that you're that you've engaged with the treaty engagement and drink consent with that those those persons and those environments cannot be abandoned ever, you have to be faithful to them. Now, when you try to put this as I have on informed consent forms, when you try to put that in the last page of consent form saying, I will be responsible for anything that happens to you, all all physical events that happen to you all. If you get harmed in this experiment, I will pay for this. That's terrifying for people. But that's what needs to happen. If because then scientists would take it quite seriously. And we can count on them to take it seriously if they were actually actually responsible, they and their institutions are responsible for the implications of their work, not just by the way how it is now that you're you and your institution will profit if it's successful, rather enormously, but it should be that and in fact, if it goes awry, you and your institution are personally responsible, morally responsible, and financially responsible for the effects. That's real consent. And that's real fidelity. So but and making and making that claim, I think, is much more secure and much more enduring than making a claim that how safe it's going to be when you really can't promise that. So that's, that's a lot to aim for. But I think that's what that's what we could do instead of when we're talking about something like gene drives, I'm going to talk about something like the real projects, the serious projects that engineering biology wants to attempt. So I think that ties in really well to our next question, actually, which is focused more around our current situation in the COVID-19 pandemic. So synthetic biologists have been actively developing diagnostics and vaccines to address the pandemic. And at the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a lot of inequities in our society. So thinking about this principle of fidelity and other philosophical principles, how can we learn from the past to ensure that synthetic biology advances promote equity in this current environment? Well, as someone who is a teaches justice theory, and it's thought it written a book about justice, you can imagine just imagine how horrifying it is to see the the play out of the deep systems of injustice in American health care in particular, but also in health care systems around around the world, where the poor and the most vulnerable bear the burden of this horrible disease, especially concerning in the last few weeks is to see how wealth and privilege can push you to the front of the queue and disappear and monoclonal antibodies and VIP treatment. That's been an extraordinary distressing outcome. It's not only the poor or disadvantaged going into the disease, but also disadvantaged in terms of resource allocation. So the impulse around how the vaccine should be distributed is complicated because there's many things to consider, one of which is the fact that COVID is a different disease for the elderly, for the over 65, and for the people with pre-existing conditions, just a different case fatality rate, just age based than it is for younger people. But people who are over 65 and have a pre-existing condition often aren't doing essential work, right? So essential workers might be younger and more exposed. So it ends up being a complicated disease dynamic and figuring out what's the most efficacious way to move. But then there's also the principle of equity, which is at least in this one time, if not in other times, we can't fix injustice and structural injustice and sexual racism. But at least this one moral gesture, giving a vaccine out, at least this one shouldn't be done on the basis of race or class. At least this one should be a gesture made in justice. And that's why people have foregrounded the essential worker category, because they disproportionately tend to be poor people, persons of color, Latinx and black people who are doing that sort of work. Not only because you're going to get essential workers who do complicated, running the nuclear power grid or something. You certainly don't want them to get all sick either, so they're essential. So that will sweep in some in a complex manner, some people who aren't marginalized. But the attempt, you can see the good hearted attempt at trying to act for justice as we think through the vaccine distribution schemes. Hopefully there'll be enough vaccines for everyone. Then we're going to have to look at the fever problem, which is what does it mean when highly organized, wealthy societies can be vaccinated, but poor societies cannot. One of the interesting paradoxes of this disease is with the horrible exception of Brazil, in India and in Africa, and in many parts of Latin America, the disease burden has been very low, particularly in Africa. There's a lot of complicated reasons why that's so, and it's not entirely worked out, but it is in fact demonstrably true. So it doesn't have the kind of deep injustice that say a disease like dengue fever or malaria has, but potentially it would if COVID ever gets to Africa. So you want to make sure that everyone is vaccinated, everyone has access to the vaccine. And again, here too, we've seen really brilliant interventions by WHO by saying it's got to be free. It's got to be cheap. It's got to be access. So at the very beginning of this, you can see how we have matured not only scientifically, remarkably, miraculously scientifically to get it out this fast, but also how we have matured morally to insist on equity, to insist on social justice. And that's, we should be just as proud about that as well. Are there particular steps that synthetic biologists could have done to address this, you think, in a more equitable light? So I think for instance, the mRNA vaccine development and distribution and any of these things, is that to blame on scientists? Is that to be blamed on government policy makers? I don't know. I think synthetic biologists have more than many other fields, because if you're a bioethicist, if you're a synthetic biologist or an engineering biologist, you're in one field. If you're a bioethicist, you're in this field. I'm in this field. I'm also interested in neuroscience and in clinical pediatrics. So compared to other scientific fields, you're the field that always thinks about justice. You're the field that again and again talks about what you call human practices. And by the way, you may not know how rare this is, but it's incredibly rare for this to be foregrounded. Stem cell biologists did the same thing. They insisted on having ethics in the front of their work. And to some extent, people who are mapping the human genome carved out that small amount of money, small for science, very big for humanities, to carve out money to do ELSI projects, ethical, legal, social implications of their work. All pretty new. But for this field, for engineering biology, from the very beginning, people have understood, the founders of the field have understood from the very, very beginning. And I'm thinking Jay Keesey and I'm thinking Dr. Andy. They've always understood how central ethics is to their work. And that's remarkable and extremely optimistic about the future of the field. And it's always been focused every single time to hear synthetic biology paper. Unlike other papers, there's attention to the power dynamics, there's attention to money, there's attention to what's the implications? Where am I going with this? I want to go big. I want to fix the world. There's a different sort of quality to it. It's very exciting. You don't necessarily see that in other fields. They have different sorts of goals. So that's, again, the engineering training, the engineering, the trace of engineering. I think it has been good for two of us in this way. What else could you do? It is frustrating to me after decades of working with synthetic biology and hearing really cool science that I have to put on a little mask I've made myself out of little cotton fabric and trying to figure out, okay, I need a silk layer and figuring out and I'm sewing it. That's ridiculous. Really, can't you do any better than that? Where's the sort of cool biosynthetic fabric that I've been promised that I could slap on, would be transparent? There is something odd about how primitive the mask is and how central masking is to disease prevention. Yet, when the CDC sent you to an instruction page on how to make your own mask out of a t-shirt, I thought, well, we're really in trouble here. Suddenly, we're all back to the 15th century, figuring it out. That's surprising to me that after all this time, and here we are, it makes me think, okay, so we know that these ideas about social distance and masking are still going to be important as we go forward. This is not the last pandemic, said to say. It may be that figuring something out there would be very fortuitous. Of course, you always appear for the next pandemic. Based on the last pandemic, that's why the theater of temperature-taking took place because that worked for SARS but didn't work for a disease like this where people didn't have a fever often ever and certainly not in the beginning. You could be thinking ahead proactively, if you were a clever engineering biologist, what would we do if the disease was oral fecal contamination? How would you protect a whole population? Or if the disease was some other contaminated, some sort of fomite contamination, what would we do for that? That would be a useful thing to think about. It would be an interesting thing to spend some time imagining that and imagining how some bit of biology could intervene in that. Thank you. I'm looking at the next question. I think we've touched on some of these topics already. I guess I'll ask you two, Dr. Zoloth, do you want to talk about human germline editing? We have some other topics that are perhaps not as hot-butted. I have a quick answer to that. I don't think we are ready as a society to edit the human germline. I think there's a moratorium on it for very good reasons. You really saw how clear people were about that when the theoretical twins got created. By the way, it's been that they should be about two or three now and we haven't seen them. It's unclear whether they're real or not, but maybe they are. They're mosaic. The whole let's edit the germline thing didn't work out well. It turned out that the twins are mosaic in character and maybe the alteration may have made them more susceptible to other diseases. The CCR5 gene may or may not have done anything with their AIDS at all, so the whole project just seems so scientifically shaky. This sort of research, there's been a lot of setbacks and a lot of fraud. Every time one of those frauds happen, starting with the stem cell ones, but one after another, frauds and shaming and suicides, all of that is always bad for science. I think that this whole attempt, again, the alteration of the human gene is an unnecessary technology. If you're sophisticated enough to tamper with the embryo, you'd be sophisticated enough to do the intervention after the child is born and then do your genetic intervention then and avoid all the complications and moral difficulties of altering the germline. I think the way we talk about it is even wrong. A germline is like some 19th century odd biological phrase that if you have to place it in modern biology, you've got to figure out different ways to talk about it. But the other thing is I think these experiments are very difficult to do because you have to be pregnant. People talk about it as if there's not a pregnant woman involved, as if it's just the scientist and the embryo and then the baby at the end. Meanwhile, you have to become pregnant and you have to convince someone to be pregnant and to have a child who's had this intervention that has never been done before and we have no idea how it's going to work. I think that's an extraordinary thing to ask a woman. Children are too precious and too important and too much involved in love and relationality to be casual about it. All of that I think prohibits us from moving forward until we know much more about what's happening, about what's unfolding. It's not that long ago that genomic scientists were talking about junk DNA. We had to move beyond that level of knowledge I think before any attempt to alter the germline. There's a lot of other reasons like what we think of as beautiful and desirable now might be wrong or might be inappropriate for the future. So pushing evolution in that way might push us past the world that we should be busy building and shaping. I think it's a diversion from the real problem. The real problem isn't germline intervention. The real problem really is the sort of thing the pandemic should alert us to, which is an environment that is warming and changing because of human activity, a catastrophically warmer world, and with catastrophically new diseases crashing through barriers that were traditionally thought of as natural. That's the kind of project we should be thinking about rather than better babies. Is there anything in particular in that space that you think synthetic biology would be well poised to address? Yes, because some other sort of energy has to be found that doesn't release carbon in the environment. That's straightforward. If you could do that, that would be very helpful. Just replace that carbon, keep it in the ground, that'd be good. Or a technology that mitigates, takes carbon out of the atmosphere. It somehow does that. The ones that are being talked about now are these very classic engineering, old-school engineering ideas about putting the civil particles into the atmosphere to make clouds, which again has that 19th century quality to it. I think synthetic biology might have something smarter to say about that. All the projects about energy, either carbon reduction or sequestering or other energy sources are really important. Then of course, ones that deal with the unfolding effects like pandemic disease, like water scarcity, are going to be very, very important as well. Hopefully some of our colleagues who are listening in to this episode will draw some inspiration. Yeah, I think I should get to work on those issues. It's a hard problem. But we have to be careful because it's a hard problem, but it's not a, quote, wicked problem, unquote. It's not wicked because we know exactly what's causing it. We're not confused at all about etiology. It's that people make profit out of extracting and selling carbon. That's basically it. That's a big problem. People have made huge fortunes extracting and selling carbon-based products, oil and coal, starting with coal and moving all the way onto natural gas. These huge fortunes are now being used to confuse people and to create doubt about what to do and to stifle political movements that might constrain them. We have bad guys that have to be stopped politically and the scientists have to have some alternative. That's the part that we can do. We talked a little bit before about fidelity, but another thing that you've talked about in some of your previous work is the importance of honesty for scientists. We wanted to know why is honesty paramount for scientists and what advice do you have for scientists who are working within different types of incentive structures that prioritize publishing papers or earning grants? This is really important. In addition to the principle of fidelity, you'll notice that I haven't talked about the closet principles of autonomy at all because I think they've become a libertarian mess actually at this point, but we focus so much on autonomy that we've just lost track of what freedom means and what community means and solidarity means. So, solidarity is important too, but yes. What I want to talk about now is truthfulness, is veracity. The principle of veracity is for me a principle, one of those enduring principles like fidelity that we have to have in science because people have to trust you. This feeling of there being no real facts, that facts always being up for grabs is a really complicated problem. Now, to be sure, we are in a state that is aporetic, meaning without paths in science. You are in an open space. To really understand the aporetic nature of your plight, that you have no clear path before you can be terrifying, but it can also be very liberating. I don't mean when I say there is a real world that I mean there is a clear path, and that's different, but there is a world that is real. This weird uncertainty that the real is a matter of belief and not of facts is really a disturbing feature of our times. Of course, this has to do with our politicians that made up crowd sizes and just put forward stuff that's just nonsense. It becomes not just one person, of course we all have one person in mind here, but it's many more people who support that, many more people. You can see that Twitter creates a universe of false flags everywhere. It can be really disconcerting. It can happen occasionally, it does happen too on the left. We make up things, we tell ghost stories and scare ourselves. Around this election, there was all this fear that we were fighting in the streets or something. People accepted the rule of law and we're all moving forward. It turned out that wasn't true either. All right, that's the truth. Why truth is so important? Emanuel Kant says it's one of the few categorical comparatives he could come up with, that you must always tell the truth. For many years at Northwestern University, I taught a class about truth-telling in the science class because I thought the science requirements for ethics, and usually the science requirements for ethics were stories about, you might as well have been in a traffic school, a reading list of things to do's and don'ts. Everyone's really smart if they're getting a graduate degree in science. They know all these rules. It's not that you don't know the rules. It's that you don't think the rules apply to you. Part of it is because you think that you are the person that's in control of reality. If there's not a real, then to you too, we're subjected. Truth-telling is important because people need to trust scientists, but also because of this essential Aristotelian premise that how you become a person is a series of acts that you do all the time, a series of tiny choices. In my class on telling the truth, I stress that you can't even lie about Thanksgiving turkey. You can't even say it's not dry if it is. You can't tell your significant other that she looks beautiful or he looks handsome in the ugly t-shirt that they're wearing if they don't. You can't even lie about little things. You can't lie to make people feel better. The reason is because at the end of the day, lying comes really easily because you think it's okay. If you think it's okay in these small things, you begin to think it's okay to lie to feel better or to hype to get the grant. It is always wrong. If you take a position that it's always wrong to lie, you should always, always tell the truth, always, always. Then you might begin to trust science again, and you can trust yourself to become the kind of person that is a dependable and truthful person. Now, someone always brings up Anne Frank and hiding in the attic, so I have to say that scientists, if you're out there and if you're surrounded by Nazis with machine guns and you're hugging a 12-year-old Jewish girl, yes, you can lie to her, but short of that, you really ought not. The other one people say is if someone is mortally wounded and they're about to die and they say, well, am I dying, doctor? It may be not useful to say, yep, yep, you are. These are extreme situations. This is not your relationship to your data. We have to stop being casual about it. People think, let's clean up the data. No, don't clean up the data. Show the mistakes. Show the errors so that people know that science is honest about failure because it's science. You're experimenting and you're going to fail sometimes. The failure is part of it. Fleming and penicillin and all that. Every time people get tempted to lie, I say, do you want your doctor to lie to you? Do you want your other mechanic to lie to you because they don't want to hurt your feelings? The answer is, of course, no. No one wants to be lied to, but people say, we don't want to be able to lie or make up stuff or exaggerate things. If science worked that the press releases of our universities actually took place, we would have cured cancer long ago because all that hyping does it. After a while, that begins to erode trust. It's one of the tragic failures of the very beginning of COVID was the confusion about masks. I don't know about you, but as soon as I saw this coming, I had my masks on hand. I had already bought masks and I didn't buy the thing about masks don't protect you, whatever. I made my students all buy masks because I knew this was going to be a problem, even though smart people who I deeply respect, Laurie Garrett, for instance, tweeted that masks were useless. They were wrong. Because we've lost the capacity to see science as fallible, now people fell apart because they couldn't take that on. It wasn't positioned as that. It should have always been positioned as we have no idea what to do, but we think it might be airborne. Just in case, we think masks are really important. It turns out we don't have to wipe all our packages. Thank God, but it was better to back off on that than if we had been told something to wipe them, it would have been hard too. All of this, every time you speak in science, you have to A, be honest and B, be very clear about what you don't know. That kind of clarity would have helped us in those early days in the fog of war that was the beginning of the pandemic. You hear that now refracted in public sentiments because people are not well educated, because we haven't funded from higher education, and we don't have access to basic science classes. There was a lot of confusion about what science is. Every time there's a great fall in science, every time we learn that a scientist has lied to us, it just erodes, it chips away at the edifice. By the way, another really good reason never to lie is you'll always get found out. We now live in a very public world. It's just folly to think that nobody around you will tell. You can really pull off this lie. You're going to get found out it's always more horrible. The cover-up is always worse than the actual event in addition to the actual event. There's many, many powerful reasons not to lie and never to lie. To begin a practice, I always tell my students, try not lying at all for a week. See how that feels. Then you become aware of all the thousands of times you're tempted to say something you don't really mean or believe just for social niceties. The world could be better if it was more honest. It doesn't have to be meaner. It could be better, more straightforward, more dependable. Well, I'll have to give that a try next week. It's easier when you're in isolation and you don't talk to anybody. I only lie to myself in the mirror. Is that okay? Well, Adam Smith said, half of all the world's ills are attributed to the fact of self-deception, the worst lie of all. That's the thing about Zoom. It's like, I look like a bat. The filter is gone. We've talked about veracity now. We talked about fidelity earlier. You also alluded to solidarity. I was wondering if you could speak to that. Solidarity is a principle that's not so common in the European Union that it's enshrined in many of their country constitutions and science regulations. Their expectation is that solidarity will be primary. When you hear Angela Merkel talking about Germany's response, you'll notice that she speaks about the principle of solidarity. Of course, we have solidarity. You get that over and over again. Even in the UK, you'll see them using it. Even a Tory government will use it about the National Health Service, which interestingly is not at all a controversial politicized event as opposed to the United States, where somehow it's all about politics. Solidarity as a principle is based on this notion that we cannot exist as autonomous beings, frontiers when autonomous beings clutching our guns. It's a very different model. It's a model of an organized, closely connected society. Even rural communities are deeply engaged in solidarity. This notion that you have to preserve solidarity, there's something about mutual aid and mutual community that is in itself a good, a human good, without which societies can't really function, democracies can't really function, is very much a commonplace in European bioethics. Things that promote solidarity are things that destroy solidarity evaluating the basis of how they protect or nurture a community, not only how they're going to look after an individual. We've talked about a lot of different principles today. For a synthetic biologist like myself, who is early in their training and is about to start her career, is there one book or essay that you think all synthetic biology trainees should read? What book or essay would you recommend? There are so many good books. It's so hard. I'm going to say one basic book that I think everyone should read before they, probably as an undergraduate, which is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jeremy Diamond. Diamond's book is how the world works, how the world ended up being so deeply unjust. How did the West get all the kit? It's an interesting formational book, again, as an undergraduate. If you've missed it in your undergraduate education, go back to it and read it. There's more sophisticated versions of it, even by Diamond himself, but I think it's a very important book for really rethinking, how did the world end up being like this? What is that about? That's one book you should read. You should read very carefully the story of Fritz Haber, if you're going to be a chemist or have anything to do with engineering biology. Fritz Haber, it's such a compelling story about someone who has done such extraordinary things for humanity, synthetic nitrogen, but who got caught up in the catastrophe of history in Germany and in working for the war. The book about the chemist's war, I think it's called the chemist's war, about how both France and Germany, their best scientific minds get caught up in using their technology to kill each other instead of saving lives, is a fascinating and a very disturbing story. The playing out of Haber's life where he gets exalted as head of the Max Planck Institute, head of this enormous scientific production in Germany, Hitler's favorite scientist, and then ultimately he's a Jew and his family gets deported and killed in Auschwitz by Zykon B, which he has developed in his lab and yet refused to produce because at some point he realizes he has to stop doing this, only after his chemist's wife and his own son kill themselves and despair about the situation. He of course dies on his way going to Israel, then Palestine, where he's determined to work this time for the Jewish people. It's a very interesting tragic story. It's a cautionary tale. I think that people should spend some time thinking about how science itself, because it is a serious, serious and dangerous and elegant tool and how as a tool it can be wielded, ultimately for good or for evil. That's why ethics is so important. Science alone is like a light switch, whether it's going to be connected to a nuclear bomb or whether it's going to be connected to the Paris hospital. That's the ethical choice. How it's used is the ethical choice. Scientists have to be part of making that and have to understand that as they make this technology, that it will never be able to be used separate from the deep moral choices in society. That's really a reason to keep thinking about someone like Haber. And I'll give you 10 books, so many wonderful books about the principles of science and why humanities really has to remain central to the scientific influence. You probably read a lot of Shakespeare. What's your favorite? Shakespeare? Yeah. Well, I'm really loving, I love Lear. Actually, I found Richard III. Yeah, interesting because really the moral question, how far are you going to go for power? Though I once read a book about that heroicized Richard III, makes me read that playability differently. My position on Shakespeare changes all the time. This has been a really fascinating interview. I'm going to give you maybe one last chance. Is there anything else you'd like to plug for your listeners? Any words of wisdom or programs or anything like that? Upcoming publications. I'm looking forward to a publication of a book about gene drives in which I take up a lot of these questions, including the question of science in a time of uncertainty. Hopefully I'll spend more time thinking about that and finish this. That looks almost done. So that's one. And I've just completed in the publication process a new book on global warming and Jewish thoughts. So if you're interested in that, look forward to that. And then a third book on them, clinical ethics, pediatric ethics, and again, Jewish and feminist thought about those things. You can see I'm interested in other things besides you, though I love synthetic biology. I feel slighted that I feel like I'm responsibility to my other parts of my discipline as well. So if you're interested in reading about other things than gene biology, look for those. It's been a real pleasure. It's always a privilege to me. It's from the first moment of being invited to think about stem cells to thinking about it, to working at HHMI and thinking about the beautiful, elegant science that I was so privileged to see unfold there. The chance for someone who thinks about ethics, thinks about philosophy and doesn't do the real work of science. And by the way, I used to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, so I know what real work is. Work that starts at 730 in the morning and has a shift in touching bodies. And the way you touch a body affects the life of the child. I know that real work that I've stepped back from in philosophy, that it's a privilege to be able to think about and comment on and reflect on the real moral gesture that is science. And make no mistake, it is what makes us human, is this search for knowledge and this restless, always unfinished, aporetic quest for knowledge in a world of deep uncertainty. And that is a very noble gesture and very noble moral gesture. And it's a huge privilege to be able to be invited into the laboratories and the conferences where you're thinking about those things. So I'm always aware of how lucky I am and what a privilege it is to be here. Well, it's been a privilege for us to be able to have you on our podcast. It's been really fascinating talking with you today. Okay, thanks for asking me. This has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're interested in becoming a member of the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application on our website. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team, Catherine Brink, Fatima Anam, Andrew Hunt, Adam Silverman, and Kevin Reed. Thanks also to EBRC for their support and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing another episode with you soon.