mYERS:

Many years ago, the popular image of the scientist was

either Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelwe.
monsters you couldn't control, or you were plotting to blm up the world.
Do you think that image still prevails?

YOU were either creatirq

SIN-: It still prevails inmy places. I expriens it

personally.

do.

the roam.

like ~r. Frankenstein. But they sanehow are frightened and think that I
nust live in a world apart, without the sanae kind of human concerns they
have.

People meet me casually at dinners or parties and ask what I

when I say, rlIfm a molecular biologist," they go to the far end of

I suppose they're puzzled by the fact that I don't look or act

MOYERS:

Perhaps they're ashamed, as I often am, of their ignorance

of the field, and unable to talk to you about it.
the conversation to somebody else who can talk about the weather or
politics.

So they politely shift

SINGER:

    That's certainly true, because people do apologize and then,
of course, to be polite, $& say, oh, don't worry about that, I don't knw
about whatever it is you know about.
accepting those apologies.
that I'm sorry for what they don't how, but it's never too late to learn.

What does it say to you that our society has such a negative

-7

But, in fact, I've given up

I'm mch more forthright nm.

I tell than

MOYERS:

jmage of scientists?

SINGER:

It says that science was not an integral part of most

people's upbringing and education.
ccome to understand that science wks one of the grand human activities.
uses the same kind of talent and creativity as painting pictures and
making sculptures.
frcan a base of technical knowledge.

As they were gruwiq up, they didn't

1.

It

It's not really very different, except that you do it

Science is not an inhuman or superhuman activity.

It's samething that

humans invented, and it spedks to one of our great needs--to understand

the world around us.
lost their curiosity, because that's all it is.

In the end, it makes you wonder whether people have

M3YERS:

Given the negative image of scientists, why did you as a

young wcrman decide to became one?

SINGER:

1'11 give you the answer that, in fact, my, my

scientists give when asked this question.
teacher in high school.
because I was interested in what she taught, and very demanding.

I had one mawelous chemistry

She was an exciting teacher, interested in me

MOYERS:

     That's not a tenn you hear about my teachers these days,
I'm sorry to say. In fact, since I called you and asked you to do this
interview, there was another report saying that kids caning out of high
schools are increasingly scientifically illiterate.

SINGER:

It would be difficult to give a god scientific education

without being demanding.
th&y-off is mawelous, because when you do the hard work and cane to
understand somethirig about the way the world works, then the satisfaction
is so enormous that it makes you willing to do mre damding work.

There's a certain amount of hard work, but

Wzt

if the hard, intellectual work to understand is not demanded of you, then

you can't have the pleasure of it either.

Let me tell you a story that goes back to the days when my now

2

--up children went to junior high school.  ~ach of them in turn came
into a biology class that was taught by a superb teacher.
weeks of the beginning of the schcol year, on each of those four
occasions, I began to get calls frum parents of other children in the
class asking whether I would join a delegation to the principal, to
complain about the amount of work that this biology teacher gave.

parents thought she gave too mch harework.

biology was that important.

join the delegation.  Now these parents were highly educated and had great
expectations for their children, although none of those expectations

included science.

was being demanded of their children.

Within two

The

They also didn't think

They were shocked to leam that I wouldnlt

They just didn't feel that it was worth the effort that

MOYERS:


SINGER:

This happened not just with one child of yours?

        It happened each time, four times in a row.

didn't see the opportunities in being a scientist.
the profound importance of scientific discovery and technical cmpetence
to the society in which they live.

that they thought there was a free lunch out there, which there isn't.

was a very depressing experience.

The parents

They didn't un3erstand

1 think their response also hdicated

It

MOYERS:

what happns to a society where the curiosity goes, and

scientists are seen as marginal at best, and wasteful at worst?

SINGER:

On any day, if you look at the front page, half the stories

                         A society that

usually have a technical or scientific ccnnponent in them.

turns its back on science has to face decay and deterioration.

There are people who ramanticize, who say, wouldn't it be nice to go

back to the lovely old days when we didn't have pollution problems?  In a

way it would--but we can't.

We have a much laryer population on the

3

Those days weren't so terrific either.

Many, my infants died within

the first week of birth.

we're living now.

globe.

Very few people lived the nice long lives that

Very few people cauld visit different parts of the

Everybcdy seems to want the fruits of science, and everyone

BJt +De

recognizes that those fruits have a costa- new problems

A

tWk will not be resolved unless we deal with them in a scientific way.

We must advance new howledge so that we have mre ideas about haw to deal

with the continually new problems that we have.

MOYERS:

When you look at the 21st century, which is not that far

away now, what are the scientific problems you think a republic like ours
is going to have to face?

SINGER:

We're go- to have to face population problems in our

republic and all over the world.

we always face major problems, by a combination of things, including
limiting the population and dealing with sane of the very difficult issues
that arise when we have a large population.

And we're going to have to face them as

MOYERS:


SINGER:

And science is at the heart of that issue?

Science is at the heart of how we will continue to grm

enough food for all of these people.  We're not doing it now.

people starving all over the world, and the answer is scientific

agriculture.

field of genetics and molecular biology.

extraordinarily deep unkrstanding of the way living things work, and of

how to dpulate them properly, so that we can imprave food production in

Africa, for example.

There are

A lot of the answers will corne fran the advances in my own

We're coming to a really

our esrvhnmental. problems are to a very large extent derivative of

4

population problems.  We're constantly apardmg ' the places that we need
to live, so that we're tearing dm forests, destroying natural wetlands
and savannahs--&mghq the nature of our planet in order to accmmcdate
this ever-increasing population which is, at the same time, increasing its
expectations for haw it's go- to live.

Transportation is another problem we must address as we spread

populations out.
same the, without doing further destruction to the environment.

People need to be moved arounfi faster and yet, at the

mm:

We think of these as political issues, and of course they

are.

addressed if we're going to resolve them.

But you're saying that there's a scientific core that has to be

SINGER:

The political decisions--to the extent that political

decisions deal with reality, which they don't always do-will be made on
the basis of options that are pravided by scientific discuveries and the
technological developnent of those disC0verie.s.  One of the things that
stems fm this is that there is more power in the scientific camunity

than many people realize.

Many people default to the scientific

dty.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

 SING^:

They leave the options that will eventually inform the

political decisions to the scientists, because people are unwilling to
include science as part of their general education.

MOYERS:

How do we mke an info& choice if we don't know at least

the basic vocabulary?

smm:

The only way we can do it is the way every study of the last

dozen years has told us.
we insist that teachers not tum kids off science.

We insist that our young people learn science.

Getting young children

5

interested in science is the easiest thing in the world.
at night and look at the moon, and outside aUrk~ the day and look at the

You go outside

sun, and then you ask children, 'What is our relation to the mw ip";o:n ?I1

take them dawn to the air andpace gplseum and show themwhat the earth
looks like if you're up at the mwn, which we can do now, because we've

* / *

been there, and the children begin to generate the same questions that

astronmers generate.

Then you win to talk to them about how you learn

the answers, and they're engaged.

wlt sanewhere between the fourth and

fifth grade, something happens.

We lose them.

We kill that creative

curiosity.

There is a fear of science and scientists.

It's strange to me that

people don't realize that the way to deal with that fear is to learn about

it.  We scientists are not very fearful people.
a samewhat different way, but we kmwe the same good and bad as everyone

else.  The negative things about scientists are the same as the negative

things about anyone else.  There's a lesson to be learned there, because
if people would talk to us and learn what we're like, they would realize

We look upon the world in

shw tcaik

A

this, and they would then be less afraid of science.

don't want to talk about scientific issues.

But a lot of people

They draw very firm lines.

MOYERS:

Bn't you think they say, ItLetts let Maxine Singer handle

it.

Let's let the scientists do it.t1

SINGER:

Well, they do and they don't, because eventually it canes

kr10cJcing on their door.

One of the very good examples of this in our

society is the constant trouble we have had for forty or fifty years with

the notion of evolution.  Every couple of years, this becomes an issue in

American schools, and we fight this battle all over again.

There are

people who have a very fumlamntal belief in the Bible as a description of

6

the world an3 as essentially a scientific document, but they represent a
very mall percentage of the population.  Yet mre than fifty percent of
Americans, when asked year after year, say they believe that creationism
should be taught along with evolution in the schools.  Thatis an amazing

number.

It tells us that over fifty percent of Americans, and that

includes a lot of very highly educah ed Amricans, are very uneasy about
the notion of evolution. I think itls because they think that if we
accept the theory of evolution, we scmehm leave behind a lot of the
premises on which our human interactions are based.

MOYERS:

Religious folks say that the work of people like Maxine

Singer establishes the relationship of everything to a common ancestor,
that genetics confirm evolutionary biology, and that it leads to a
profoundly mechanistic view of the world, in which there is no room for

God. That's part of the fear leadirig to the dete.rmination that
creationism will be taught in the high schools along with evolution.

SINGER:

It is true that -ern genetics has confirmed all of the

ideas of evolutionary biology. A very famous geneticist said, many years
ago, that there was no way to think about the natural world that made any
sense except in terms of evolution.  If you try to think about the living
world without the concept of evolution, it would be sarnething like
teaching lawyers to be lawyers without reference to the United States

Constitution.

OUT Constitution.
framework of evolution. And modern genetics has confirmed that- PE?ople
fear the challenge of a mechanistic view of life, and that is indeed what
modern genetics teaches =--a very mecham 'stic view of life.

We only think about law in our country in the framework of

Biologists can only think about the living world in the

mm:

And a mechanistic view means-

7

SINGER:

It means that if you look at a corn plant, you want to

explain how the corn plant grows, why it puts out an ear of corn that's

yellow, or red, why it grows well with a certain anmunt of water, what you

can do to make it graw better during dmucJht-in other words, you explain

the corn plant as you would a madhe.

We can do that in terms of the

molecules that gd~~ make up the corn plant.

Mom:

You say it is rnecham 'cal, but not like the mcJvexbent of a

clock.

SINGER: No, it's much more flexible than that. A lot of things are

changing as part and parcel of the whole system.

We know that the

simplest organisms on our planet are the same as we are, in terms of being

what they are because of
ourf$ we can speak of a commcln origin someplace at the beginning.


being.

molecules that are not very different from

ow r\

MOYERS:

You mean the .same thing is in the yeast that is in the human

SINGE?:

In fact, you can take a human gene, and it will correct a

mutation in a yeast cell.

MOYERS: What does that mean?

SINGER:

That means that a piece of INA fm human cells, when added

to the DNA of the yeast cell-the same yeast that we use to bake our bread

and make our wine--- actually be therapeutic for a yeast cell that's

CCQ fl

sick because of a bad gene.

What we're do- is gene therapy on yeast.

We have a sick yeast cell because it has a genetic disease.

cure the yeast cell's genetic disease with a human gene.

that we have a lot in common with the yeast cell.

       And we can

     That tells us

The same is true for

all kinds of organisms.

Yeast is the mst dramatic example, because it's

a simple one-celled organism.

MOYERS:

Well, what that says to the fundanaentalist is that what God

hath wrought, Maxine Singer can put asunder.
vision--What is man, that Thou has made him a little lesser than the

angels.

It destroys the Psalmist's

SINGER:

     I don't think it destroys the psalmistts vision  at all.
The Psalmist was talking about IM~, and man remains that way.  our
relations with one another and with our society remain quite separate fm
our ability to understand haw we work. Ancient people were just as
curious as we were about where the stars cams frcnn, and where we cams

from.
their explanations tqether with expectations about standards of human
behavior and notions of human love.
we're not really changing those other things.
pieces of evidence for that.
people in about the sanae praportion as in the rest of society.
people who adhere to the hicjhest standards of human conduct, and there are
people who are as greedy and mney-grubbing as anywhere else, in spite of
the fact that we look to natural explanations.

They made explanations in terms of what they knew, and they tied

We're changing the explanations, but

There are a couple of

There are mng scientists deeply religious

                       There are

MOYERS:

So science doesn't me the essential qualities of human

beirigs, their love for justice, or their passion for greed, or their sense
of fairness, or their sense of alienation?

SIN=:

What it changes are the old explanations and

rationalizations for the way
our fundamental human problems or the way we deal with each other.  What
it does, fundamentally, is give us ways to deal with the difficult things
that we find on the planet and ways to enhance our lives.

things occurred, but it doesn't change

Think of what

your life would be without the marvelous ability to have terrific music in

9

your own hare.

now confoun3 us and cause nothing but misery.  We will have ways to deal
with diseases that we almost don't reccgnize yet, including propensities

taward certain diseases.  We'll be able to deal with those things, because
we're beginning to understan3 the way we work, the way the corn that feeds
us works, and the way elements that cause disease work.

fundamentally the same way.

In genetics, we will have ways to deal with diseases which

I

                  I

R~~G~L~cLLJ~~, a~\ these II~~fiq*%s '

WIB=IE& work in

A

Mom:

what are you working on right now in your research?

SIN-:

I'm interested in human genetics, particularly in aspects of

the structure of human DNA, what we call the human genom.
just a collective word for all the DNA in the human cell.

v~Genarel' is

The whole

collection of genes and other pieces of

human genae.

that are not genes mdke up the

9

Mom:

Now just so that a scientifically illiterate journalist

would understand the analqy-would it be right to say that the gene is to
the human makeup as the thread in this Suit is to the Suit?

SINGEEI:

No, the best way to look at it is that a gene is like a

sentence in an encyclopdia.

It's a piece of information buried in the

genae, the whole encyclopedia, which is a vast store of information.

The

gene instructs the cell how to do some one thing.

All tcgether, the

sr; \\\an5
-+I&-- of cells in your bociy do all the things that make you who you

are, and that make a corn plant what it is, and that make a yeast cell

what it is.

Mo~:

So the better analogy would be perhaps that it's like a

chip.

preCer

SIN-:

It's a chip-but w=m&k%e the old-fashioned analogy of a

A

book--like an encyclopedia, or a sentence that gives you a piece of

10

information.

ID=:

SIN-:

what are you trying to explore about it?
Well, in fact, what my colleagues and I in my lab do is not

quite looking at what a gene is like.

It turns out that a lot of c%IIA

doesn't clearly have any information, at least as far as we know now.
It's as though you had an encyclopedia, and on every third page there was
a lot of jabberwock.

exactly the same jabbemock again--& two pages later, there it was

again.

And then you turned six more pages, and you repeated

    It doesn't look like a gene--that is to say, it doesn't look like

a meaningful sentence.                    And I'm certainly

confounded by the fact that it occurs so my times.  My colleagues and I
            in the human gene that occurs probably on the

A

are looking at a..sdmme

order of 100,000 times, and altogether mdkes up about five percent of the
DNA in every cell. Why? We don't know. What is it doing? We don't

know.

I can't figure out what it is.

DNC\ SC?..W@u\f.

(h

We do know that new copies of it can be made in i&e human cell and

put in a new place in the W.  And we know, thanks to the work of scrme

human geneticists at Johns Hopkins, that it can cause mutations.

That was

a very exciting finding in the last year for us, because it says that this
piece of gendc jahberwock can pi& itself up fm one place in the

gen- and settle dawn somewhere else, where it can cause a mutation-in

this particular case, two instances of the disease of hemophilia.

So,

it's very real and very serious.

ID-:

what is the value of finding this out?

SINGER: The value is severalfold. First of all, if we can

understand what mdkes such a sequence me about, we will have understood

the cause of a certain amount of genetic disease.  We will be able to

understand the role of flexibility in the

molecule. The analogy to

11

the encyclopedia falls dawn once you realize that INA raves itself abaut
and changes in all of us, all the the.

we'll learn,

That's one of the things that

mYEFG:

There's a lot of talk in this city about the human gename

project, which will cost billions of dollars.

What is it?

SINGER:

To continue the analogy I've been using, it would be

e

equivalent to saying that we could write out th& encyclopedia for human

INA, and that we would know all of the information in a human cell.  We

would how how to find it, as we do when we look in an inda of an

encyclopedia, or when we look up sanething alphabetically.  We would know

how to turn to the gene that causes hemphilia when it's mutated.  We

would how how to turn to the page that says this gene is going to be
important in causing a certain tumr.
gene in a person, and perhaps make sane guesses as to whether that person
is likely to develop a certain tumor or not.

We would know hm to look at that

MOYERS:

So if you hew that, then you could begin to think about

altering the gene to prevent the disease.

SINGER: The genome project is defined ery grandly. It

will do a lot ofm things along the way.
+he
wl&s genanes

human genome project is by comparison with plants and yeast cells.

It will tell us a lot about

in other species, because one of the ways we'll do the

                                         One

elernent of science is comparison.

comparing two things.

is it not like that?  And what can we learn?

      You learn a tremendous munt by

This is like that, or this is not like that.  why

mYEFG:

Wzt why should the public buy into this project with such

vast sums of money?  It will cost two or three billion dollars.

SINGER:

Those sums of money gre going to be spent over a long period

12

of time.
answer, is because the public is curious about itself, as curious as we

are. We scientists will do the work, but we will all share in the
understanding that it gives us about ourselves and the world we live in.

But the nice answer to your question, the granfi and glorious

The public will also be interested because it is with that knowledge that

be tfcr

we're go- to be-able to deal with starvation, to learn how to grow

A

plants in Africa that can't now be grown there.  We're going to learn how

cerhln ,,

to deal with disease; We will improve the lot of all mankind.

A

mYERS: --New cures for cancer? New vaccines?

SINGER:

--Eventually new cures for cancer, new vaccines, and things

unimaginable to us now, but which we know we will learn by do- this.
can't even describe them.
that we can't describe now is that this has been the history of science.
We do things to learn sanething we can define, and we wind up knowing
things we never imagined even asking about.

                                   We
The reason we know that we will discover things

HXERS:

A lot of us are nervous about the whole idea of genetic
We're not sure we should be fooling around with our genes.

engineering.

SINGER: why aren't you sure? what bothers you?

mm:

1'11 show you a picture fram me Economist that illustrates

what scares people.

SINGER: okay.

MOW:

That's a picture of what's called a geep.

A scientist at

Cambridge University crossed the embryos of a goat and a sheep and got a
three-legged geep.

People see this and imagine a future of horrible

mutilations, of sanething
  SDTGER: Thegeepis
whether it could be done,

beyond human beings.  That's one part of it.
something that sameone did in order to learn
but it's not something that people are going to

13

be making, except on an occasional experimental basis.
not sanething that will ever be done with hman beings in any similar way.

And it is surely

MOYEES:


SINGER:

How can you say that with such certainty?
Because scientists are hman beings, as human as those who

are not scientists.

to doing any genetic engineering on hman beings has corme fram the
scientific comrrmnity.
scientific cormmnity about doing genetic qineerhg on human beings.
the evidence for that is the level of review and discussion within the
scientific Community prior to doing even very small things-nothing that

canes even close to a geep.  I talked before about comecting a mutation
in a yeast cell.  We can imagine ways of correcting human mutations, and
people are trying to devise ways to do that as therapeutic devices.

They share the sarne values.

The greatest resistance

There are very strong feelings within the

And

That's not really very different fram therapies that we've used before

Bot-

PIs very

because they're designed to correct a certain disease.

different in that it will be mch mre precise and effective, and will be

a better cure.

mt even before thinking about that, there has been an e.xtraordinary

level of conversation in the scientific carmrmnity as well as in gatherings
of people from outside the Cammunity to cane to sc~~~be general notion about
what we think is useful to do--what is hman, and what is humane, and what

is someething that no one would ever do.

MOYEG:

But in the end, the scientific cxmmunity is not itself

responsible for what happens to its discoveries.

is touching.

created the oven, I don't think they expcted a Christian nation in the

Your faith in humanity

It may be more so than the journalist's.

But when engineers

heart of Europe to put millions of human beings to death in than.

14

SINGER:

What you're saying is son~thing I would agree with.

If the

knmledge that is gained is misused, it is not because of science or the
scientist, it is because of the same old human problems that have caused

evil for eons.

~YERS:


SINGER:

There's a will to use what we know.

And whether evil uses technology that's new or technology

that's old, what motivates it are human problems that have nothing to do
with the developcents in technology.
devel-t the scapegoat because it gives evil people new tools to do
evil seems to be missing the boat.  To the extent that the traditional

ways of defining mral behavior have failed, the newer ways will fail,
too, because hman beings will remain the way they are.

To make technological and scientific

MOYERS:

Then what do we do about this?  Because if we learn how to

transplant genes and to alter the genetic code, shouldn't there be  son^

standan& for the use of that howledge?

SIN=: Of course there should be sbtiards. Several of my

colleagues and I spent the better part of a decade in the seventies

working on standards for the very earliest genetic engineering experiments
at a the when our concerns were not about misuses of hm gene theram,

but about the safety of the things that would be constructed.  Scientists

now are spendhg enomus amounts of time trying to inform publicly
responsible individuals and groups about the nature of what we're doing so

that people can figure out what the standards aught to be.

simply say no to ev-, then we turn our backs on our abilities to

solve the very real problems that we have.

But if we

Mom:

What do you see personally and scientifically as the dangers

in genetic exqineering?

15

SINGER:

I don't actually see dangers in gene therapy for genetic

diseases as long as they are carried aut under the general kinds of
standards that we have cane to apply to medical intervations in
general-that the research should go on after review by knuwledgeable
scientists and non-scientists; that things are done with the consent of
those on whm new practices are tried; that they are done in the context
of institutions which provide guidelines and mnitorhq of what happens in
the hospital and the laboratory.

That's the way we have to do it.

It's hard work. It's

time-consming.
so many ways, and yet limit the possible dangers.

Wzt it should help us derive the benefits that we want in

MOYERS:

An interesting poll not long ago showed that forty percent

of the people in this country said they thought it was mrally wrong to
alter the genetic code, but eighty percent of them went on to say that
they would be willing to risk it if they thought taking that risk might
prevent a disease they had themselves.

I find those polls very puzzling.

what they tell rne is that

The people who say, "1 just

people lack an understanding of the sciences.
don't think it's right to rneddle with these genes in this wayt1 don't
mderstand enough about what we're dohq to be able to sort aut for
themselves what's right or wrong about it.  In my judgment, there's

nothing profoundly wrong *ut it.
the beginning of time by breeding farm animals and plants for better

We're been fooling with genes since

yields.
for young people on the basis of what the family thinks the grardchildren

will be like.                                         We're

just learning how to do things a little better  and in a mre humane way.

In ancient times, and even now in same cultures, mates are chosen

That's breeding human beings, and that's accepted.

16

People used to think that disease was a punishment.

smallpox, for

example, was viewed as a punishment for evil deeds that people did.

PDYERS:

Yes, there was a rnan named John Woolman.

/R+~ Cen+ury

SINGER:

Yes, a famous emember of the Society of Friends, a

A

marvelous man--but he believed that smallpox carte from God.

        --to instruct humans in virtue.  Woolman was the sam man

MOYERS:

who was so opposed to slavery.

SINGER: Exactly. There are people now who believe that AIDS

represents the same kind of punishment.
punishment to hman beings, it evolved on the face of the earth with the

rest of us. It evolved, in fact, in conjunction with man. It lived off


man.

face of the earth.

But smallpox didn't cane as a

We have killed the smallpox virus.  We donlt have it anymre on the

PDYERS:

I've often wondered, if John Woolman came back today,

whether he would think that Gcd had changed His mind.

SINGER:

We are mch better off for the absence of smallpox, and we

have not paid any price for its absence.

look upon AIDS as a punishment.
structure we can describe in such a way that we can think about it
rationally and try to figwe out ways to end the scourge that it has

brought on our society.

There are people to this day who

It's caused by a virus whose

It's not.

These are the kinds of things that came only fmm

science.

PDYERS:

You know, I hear you, and I believe you, but there are

ccnmnon concerns out there that people keep telling rne about genetic

engineering.  Now these concerns may ccnne out of a great ignorance,

hclUaing the ignorance and superficiality of journalism.
people saying, !Well, will it be possible for parents to seek hormones

But you hear

17

that will produce a seven-foot basketball player so that I can raise my
kid to go out there and mike mney as a professional athlete?"

SINGER:

Yes, it is possible to do that.

You can do that today

without any genetic engineering of humans, because genetic engineerins has
made growth homne available cheaply.
treat people who are diseased h the sense that they donlt xnake it

themselves.

give to their children to make them good athletes.
of the scientist who cloned the human growth hormone gene in order to help
children who suffer from an absence of it and would he dwarves otherwise.
The problem is the same old human problem of greedy, thoughtless parents
who are using something to achieve an end that the scientists who

developed it never dreamt of.

We need the growth hormone to

It's available, and it's cheap.

But people are buying it to

Thatls not a problem

Mom: We're back to ethics.


SIN=:

We're back to ethics, but not the ethics of scientists,

except insofar as they're people like anyone else.

MoYERS:

What about the weightier concern I've heard in some quarters

that if we start manipulating genes for profit, we will be giving a
powerful econOmic incentive to seeing of human nature as essentially a

materialistic phenmon.

SINGER: I must tell you, straight out--1 think it's bunk.

MOYEBS: Don't mince your words.

SINGER:

Let me put it to you this way:

It is easily possible-we do

it every day in the lab--to synthesize a gene out of chemicals.

lMke a human growth hormone gene.
between the gene that I have made in the laboratory and the gene I would

isolate from a human cell.  Why is this somehcw mystical?  Why are genes

I can

There is no way to tell the difference

18

given a quality they don't have simply because they - out of human

beings?

r/gjyERs:

Many of us are raised with a sense of reverence for human

life.  We think of human beings as constituting a special, divine
creation, and we're not certain aboutmcking around with it.

SINGER:

we are special. ~nd we are ma~elous. =Sere are many [i~,h3

things in the world that are marvelous.  How does it diminish our sense of

ourselves to understand that we are the prcduct of a lot of molecules
cclming together in a mawelous way?  we are not those mlecules, we are

all of them together.

  One of the things people very often mention in this context is the
uniqueness of the individual, that each one of us is marvelously different

fran every other one.  Modem genetics has told us that this is absolutely

true.

mlecules.

-up, is unique.

lot of other reasons-and biology underscores it.

no way diminishes our uniqueness.

people we lave.

write about Jupiter when they thought Jupiter was like a man?  What kind

of poet can't write about that same Jupiter if he knuws that it's a great

whirling sphere of methane an3 ammonia?  You look out at the sky, and you

look at Jupiter.

Except for identical twins, no two of us have the same ma

Biology says that each of us, with our different genetic

It's the sam splendid notion that we came to for a

Xnming hod we work in

It in no way changes how we look upon

The physicist, Richard Feyrnnan, asked why poets could

It brings in all of us the same wonder, the same awe

about the universe.

because he knows)%& it is up there.  His knmledge doesn't diminish awe

iaa&@k; it enhances it.

I think the astronmer has mre awe an3 wonfier

N chap is OI r's

E. /I

WYEEG:

Do you think a biologist may have mre awe ard wonder for

19

the human body because he or she hom what's in there?

SINGER:

I haw that's true.

My wonder at the kirds of things that

we've learned in molecular biology beats anything that anybody can tell me
in grand terms about hw extraodnary a human being is.
it is that a few changed genes have given us this
language, of ccmnurdcation, of being able to write down our history, of
having culture, of drawing pictures, of making paint-.
appreciate that mre, not less, because of what I how.

Haw incredible

gift of

I think that I

3DYERS:

Critics of genetic engineering say we are special as humans,

but that doesn't give us the right to inflict suffering on the animals
we're using for experiments.
the Agriculture Department's experimentation station, they have prcduced
pigs that turn out to be pathetically arthritic and deformed creatures

whose offspring are themselves deformed.

don't have the right to do that to innocent creatures.

For example, right mer here in Maryland, at

The anirral rights people say we

SINGER:

It's very difficult to argue that we are special as human

beings without also aryuhg that we ought to pay special attention to our

own species.

our species who suffer from disease, stamation, an3 so forth.
best ways we have of trying to help that suffering is experktation,
learning new information about how living things work.
questions we ask about living things, the only way that we have to answer
them is to do a certain amount of experimentation on animals.

Within that special attention is the need to help those of

One of the

For many of the

Naw, there is no question but that work that has gone on in the past

Some i-r me&
A

has misused animals unnecessarily.

There is no question but that

insufficient attention was paid to the lives and suffering of those

animals.

And there is no question but that we can still improve the way

20

we deal with experimental animals.

But if we were to decide that we did

not want to experiment on animals at all, we would not rcdke advances,, irl

curirg our am ills, or improvinS our am situation.
things nowadays with cells that people used to do with animals.
are othex ways to replace animals for certain kinds of experimentation.
But there are many things that we cannot do without animals.

We do a lot of

And there

?+DYERS:

So the animal rights people are not misguided in their

concern?

SINGEE?:

The animal rights people are misguided in sane of their

concerns, and in the extranes to which they go.
message which has been important.  Many people within the scientific
camunity deal with the same questions that are raised by animal rights
people, but apprcach them in rational, thoughtful ways that are not
extreme, and that allow for a balance between our need to help our awn
specid species, and our need to pay sane attention to suffering animals.

How would you respond to the more severe critics of genetic

But they also have a core

MOYERS:

engineering, like Jeremy Rifkin, who says we had better be very careful
what we release into the ernriromtent, because we donlt how enough yet
about the unintended consequences.

Genetic engineering ought to be done

under only the most protected, sheltered, restricted circumstances

imaginable.

SINGEE?:

Let me say first of all that Jeremy Riflcinls view of the

situation is a very extreme one.
we get the impression that they do because he is given a great deal of
space on television, and in newspapers and magazines.

Not many people take his view, although

The release of organisms, which Rifkin still speaks about, was, of
CoULse, the crux of the issue, ard that was raised not by m. Rifkin, but

ear \ lCS F

f 1.rS.t-

A fi

21

by scientists, including myself, in 1973 and 1974.
discussion in the mid-seventies, which engaged the public, and which
resulted in the development of very strict guidelines by the NatioM
Institutes of Health, guidelines which govern the way my colleagues and I

It was the basis of a

dQ
*experiments.

Now, Mr. fifkin knows that very, q strict guidelines were put into

place and that, as a consecpence of a great deal of new scientific
information, and consideration by scientists, ecologists, molecular
biologists, and physicians, those guidelines have been relaxed.

knows that there are still strict guidelines in place for those
expriments that have the remotest possibility of being dangerous, that
there is extensive review of experiments, and that there is extensive

mrdtoring of what goes on.  He is still crying about such things wen in
the face of a history of responsibility on the part of scientists and the

gavermmt of which we can all really be proud.  And one has ultimately to
wonder why he is still crying about the safety issue when it has been

addressed so extensively by so many people for so long.

He also

M3YE?S:

       It does seem that the scientific Cammunity, people like you,
have been responsible aver the last years in trying to cone to grips with
whatever possible dangers your experiments might pose.
are always coming up with difficult predicaments for society at larye.

mowledge for knowledgeIs sake 1 hap to believe in, and that you have

to follcw curiosity wherever it goes.

your resear& present us with very difficult choices. Example: What

happens if businesses insist on screening prospective employees for their

genetic code to see if they might be prone to certain diseases?  What does

this do to liability, to insurance Costs, to the cost of doing business?

But you scientists

But the issues that come out of

22

Society has to grapple with the consequences of your research.  wzt, as
YOU =id in the beginning of this comersation, we are an illiterate
political and social republic when it ccnnes to scientific howldge.
are we going to cope with the predicaments that you and your colieagues
are handing us almost daily?

How

SIN-:

I don't think that we--and now I say %ett because I am part

of the public as well as being a scientist-are going to deal with these
issues very effectively unless we are willing to learn something about
science.  Not every person needs to be a scientist.  But there are some
big ideas about the nature of the world that everyone ought to have as
part of his baggage.
the form of I3NA from our parents, and that our cmpetence and our
capabilities, both physical and mental, are to scrme extent depenclent upon

that.
stuff from the earth, you put less oxygen into the atmosphere.
amazing that most people don't how that the oxygen isn't just up there
for the taking, it's put there by living things called green plants.
-le somehow think the oxygen was there from the beginning.

People ought to know that we all get infonnation in

We all ought to know that if you take dm a great deal of green

It's

It wasn't.

We have to appreciate certain fundamam kin% of things if we're

going to deal with these problems.
need to bring scientists into the discourse.
advisor must give the President access to the best scientific infonnation
in the country, for health purposes, for enviromtal purposes, for
defense, for weapms building-for all these things.
nation and the success of the planet as a whole dew on scientific
discaveries, each of which ham% us a new bag of prablems.
very different fram the way the world has always been.

And for the details, we're go- to

The President's science

Our success as a

That's not

There's no free

23

MXERS:

E3ccept that we know so much more now than we did, and

everythhg is so interconnected that every advance of bmledge creates a
different kind of political and social dilemma.

SINGER:

We are very ambivalent about it, aren't we?  There's no

question that people want the help with disease offered by genetic
engineering.  There's no question that people in our country will go for
the latest device that imprareS the rrmsic they hear on their hi-fi sets.

Aril yet there's the other side of it, the new problems that wme from new

knowledge. We have this ambivalence.

problems is the ha113 way:

The only way to deal with these

look at them seriously, talk about them, and

evolve a way to deal with them.

MCXERS:

You really do feel that your work is based on human and

humane values, don't you?

SINGER:

I don't think that there is much happening on our globe

that's more humane and more concerned with hUrrranity than science.

mYE€?S:

Do you get mad at this image of the scientist as

Frankenstein and Strangelove?

S

SINGER:


MOYERS:

Y+, I get angry with it.
what does it say to you?

SINGER:

What does it say to me?  It makes me angry with seconfiary

school teachers because it makes me realize that a lot of wonderfd,
curious, bright young people are never going to have the privilege that

I've had--to work for years without a boring day: to think of scnnething
new every day; to learn things that no one has ever known before, no

matter how small it is.

I myself have not learned big things in my am

research.

11x1 not Watson or Crick or Weinberg, -.

1 learn

24

srrall things.

But to learn sanaething one day that nobody ever knew before is

scmthhg that everyone should have the mce to do.
turning off young people in our country from scientific --quite
apart fram the fact that we're turning them off fram worderful careers in

To the extent we're

terms of good incanes and the availability of great jobs-we're turning
them off from the possibility of sharing in tkis great world of discovery
that scientists now have, that explorers no longer have because we've
explored every nook and cranny on the planet, and we're not yet able to go
to Jupiter or Mars. And if part of what tumS them off is that they think
that we scientists are SomehCIw not part of the species, it's too bad.

Mom:

You like your work, don't you, even if it means being

ostracized at a cocktail party or a dinner?

SIN-:

Oh, that's a fair bargain, as far as I'm concerned.

I was a

Jim

graduate student in 1953, when -ca3lrr Watson and Francis Crick announced

what a IXA molecule lookd like.

for biology.

S

They started an incredible forty years

They allmed us to clnderstand things about living oryanims

that as a graduate student I couldn't imagine.

It isn't that the answers

were unimaginable-the questions were unimaginable.

an extraordinary the in biology.

So I've been part of

There hasn't been a day when I've

wanted to do anythixq else.

25