MAXINE SINGER

MOYERS: Many years ago, the popular image of the scientist was

either Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove. You were either creating

monsters you couldn't control, or you were plotting to blow up the world.
Do you think that image still prevails?

SINGER: It still prevails in many places. I experience it
personally. People meet me casually at dinners or parties and ask what I
do. When I say, "I'm a molecular biologist," they go to the far end of
the room. I suppose they're puzzled by the fact that I don't look or act
like Dr. Frankenstein. But they somehow are frightened and think that I
must live in a world apart, without the same kind of human concerns they
have.

MOYERS: Perhaps they're ashamed, as I often am, of their ignorance
of the field, and unable to talk to you about it. So they politely shift
the conversation to somebody else who can talk about the weather or
politics.

SINGER: That's certainly true, because people do apologize and then,
of course, to be polite, you say, oh, don't worry about that, I don't know
about whatever it is you know about. But, in fact, I've given up
accepting those apologies. I'm much more forthright now. I tell them
that I'm sorry for what they don't know, but it's never too late to learn.

MOYERS: What does it say to you that our society has such a negative
image of scientists?

SINGER: It says that science was not an integral part of most
people's upbringing and education. As they were growing up, they didn't
come to understand that science wis one of the grand human activities. It
uses the same kind of talent and creativity as painting pictures and
making sculptures. It's not really very different, except that you do it
from a base of technical knowledge.

Science is not an inhuman or superhuman activity. It's something that
humans invented, and it speaks to one of our great needs--to understand
the world around us. In the end, it makes you wonder whether people have
lost their curiosity, because that's all it is.

MOYERS: Given the negative image of scientists, why did you as a
young woman decide to become one?

SINGER: I'1l give you the answer that, in fact, many, many
scientists give when asked this question. I had one marvelous chemistry
teacher in high school. She was an exciting teacher, interested in me
because I was interested in what she taught, and very demanding.

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

SINGER: It would be difficult to give a good scientific education
without being demanding. There's a certain amount of hard work, but
thebay-off is marvelous, because when you do the hard work and come to
understand something about the way the world works, then the satisfaction
is so enormous that it makes you willing to do more demanding work. But
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
grown-up children went to junior high school. Each of them in turn came
into a biology class that was taught by a superb teacher. Within two
weeks of the beginning of the school year, on each of those four
occasions, I began to get calls from 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. The
parents thought she gave too much homework. They also didn't think
biology was that important. They were shocked to learn that I wouldn't
join the delegation. Now these parents were highly educated and had great
expectations for their children, although none of those expectations
included science. They just didn't feel that it was worth the effort that
was being demanded of their children.

MOYERS: This happened not just with one child of yours?

SINGER: It happened each time, four times in a row. The parents
didn't see the opportunities in being a scientist. They didn't understand
the profound importance of scientific discovery and technical competence
to the society in which they live. I think their response also indicated
that they thought there was a free lunch out there, which there isn't. It
was a very depressing experience.

MOYERS: What happens 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
usually have a technical or scientific component in them. A society that
turns its back on science has to face decay and deterioration.

There are people who romanticize, who say, wouldn't it be nice to go
back to the lovely old days when we didn't have pollution problems? Ina

way it would--but we can't. We have a much larger population on the
globe.

Those days weren't so terrific either. Many, many infants died within
the first week of birth. Very few people lived the nice long lives that
we're living now. Very few people could visit different parts of the
globe. Everybody seems to want the fruits of science, and everyone
recognizes that those fruits have a costeand-thet-there-ere new problems
that will not be resolved unless we deal with them in a scientific way.

We must advance new knowledge so that we have more ideas about how 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 going to have to face population problems in our
republic and all over the world. And we're going to have to face them as
we always face major problems, by a combination of things, including
limiting the population and dealing with some of the very difficult issues
that arise when we have a large population.

MOYERS: And science is at the heart of that issue?

SINGER: Science is at the heart of how we will continue to grow
enough food for all of these people. We're not doing it now. ‘There are
people starving all over the world, and the answer is scientific
agriculture. A lot of the answers will come from the advances in my own
field of genetics and molecular biology. We're coming to a really
extraordinarily deep understanding of the way living things work, and of
how to manipulate them properly, so that we can improve food production in
Africa, for example.

Our environmental problems are to a very large extent derivative of
population problems. We're constantly expanding the places that we need
to live, so that we're tearing down forests, destroying natural wetlands
and savannahs--changing the nature of our planet in order to accommodate
this ever-increasing population which is, at the same time, increasing its
expectations for how it's going to live.

Transportation is another problem we must address as we spread
populations out. People need to be moved around faster and yet, at the
same time, without doing further destruction to the enviroment.

MOYERS: We think of these as political issues, and of course they
are. But you're saying that there's a scientific core that has to be
addressed if we're going to resolve them.

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 provided by scientific discoveries and the
technological development of those discoveries. One of the things that
stems from this is that there is more power in the scientific community
than many people realize. Many people default to the scientific
community.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

SINGER: 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 make an informed choice if we don't know at least
the basic vocabulary?

SINGER: The only way we can do it is the way every study of the last
dozen years has told us. We insist that our young people learn science.

We insist that teachers not turn kids off science. Getting young children
interested in science is the easiest thing in the world. You go outside
at night and look at the moon, and outside during the day and look at the
sun, and then you ask children, "What is our relation to the moo on You
take them down to the gir and gpace guseum and show them what the earth
looks like if you're up at the moon, which we can do now, because we've
been there, and the children begin to generate the same questions that
astronomers generate. Then you begin to talk to them about how you learn
the answers, and they're engaged. But somewhere 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 leam about
it. We scientists are not very fearful people. We look upon the world in
a somewhat different way, but we awe the same good and paces 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
this, and they would then be less afraid of science. But a lot of people
don't want to talk about scientific issues. They draw very firm lines.

MOYERS: Don't you think they say, "Let's let Maxine Singer handle
it. Let's let the scientists do it."

SINGER: Well, they do and they don't, because eventually it comes
knocking 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 fundamental belief in the Bible as a description of
the world and as essentially a scientific document, but they represent a
very small percentage of the population. Yet more than fifty percent of
Americans, when asked year after year, say they believe that creationism
should be taught along with evolution in the schools. That's an amazing
number. It tells us that over fifty percent of Americans, and that
includes a lot of very highly educat Son Americans, are very uneasy about
the notion of evolution. I think it's because they think that if we
accept the theory of evolution, we somehow 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 confirms 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 leading to the determination that
creationism will be taught in the high schools along with evolution.

SINGER: It is true that modern 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 something like
teaching lawyers to be lawyers without reference to the United States
Constitution. We only think about law in our country in the framework of
our Constitution. Biologists can only think about the living world in the
framework of evolution. And modern genetics has confirmed that. People
fear the challenge of a mechanistic view of life, and that is indeed what
modern genetics teaches us--a very mechanistic view of life.

MOYERS: And a mechanistic view means--
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 amount of water, what you
can do to make it grow better during drought--in other words, you explain
the corn plant as you would a machine. We can do that in terms of the
molecules that gamit make up the corn plant.

MOYERS: You say it is mechanical, but not like the movement 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 DNA molecules that are not very different from
our. We can speak of a common origin someplace at the beginning.

MOYERS: You mean the same thing is in the yeast that is in the human
being.

SINGER: 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 DNA from 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--wiae. actually be therapeutic for a yeast cell that's
sick because of a bad gene. What we're doing is gene therapy on yeast.

We have a sick yeast cell because it has a genetic disease. And we can
cure the yeast cell's genetic disease with a human gene. That tells us
that we have a lot in common with the yeast cell. The same is true for

all kinds of organisms. Yeast is the most dramatic example, because it's

a simple one-celled organism.
MOYERS: Well, what that says to the fundamentalist is that what God
hath wrought, Maxine Singer can put asunder. It destroys the Psalmist's
vision--"What is man, that Thou has made him a little lesser than the
angels."

SINGER: I don't think it destroys the Psalmist's vision at all.

The Psalmist was talking about man, and man remains that way. Our
relations with one another and with our society remain quite separate from
our ability to understand how we work. Ancient people were just as
curious as we were about where the stars came from, and where we came
from. They made explanations in terms of what they knew, and they tied
their explanations together with expectations about standards of human
behavior and notions of human love. We're changing the explanations, but
we're not really changing those other things. There are a couple of
pieces of evidence for that. There are among scientists deeply religious
people in about the same proportion as in the rest of society. There are
people who adhere to the highest standards of human conduct, and there are
people who are as greedy and money-grubbing as anywhere else, in spite of
the fact that we look to natural explanations.

MOYERS: So science doesn't change the essential qualities of human
beings, their love for justice, or their passion for greed, or their sense
of fairness, or their sense of alienation?

SINGER: What it changes are the old explanations and
rationalizations for the way tiumme things occurred, but it doesn't change
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. Think of what

your life would be without the marvelous ability to have terrific music in
your own home. In genetics, we will have ways to deal with diseases which
now confound us and cause nothing but misery. We will have ways to deal

with diseases that we almost don't recognize yet, including propensities |

toward certain diseases. We'll be able to deal with those things, because |

we're beginning to understand the way we work, the way the corn that feeds

Remartably , ali these Living things |
us works, and the way elements that cause disease work. jNiexnet work in

fundamentally the same way.

MOYERS: What are you working on right now in your research?

SINGER: I'm interested in human genetics, particularly in aspects of
the structure of human DNA, what we call the human genome. "Genome" is
just a collective word for all the DNA in the human cell. The whole
collection of genes and other pieces of DNA that are not genepvene up the

human genome.

MOYERS: Now just so that a scientifically illiterate journalist
would understand the analogy--would it be right to say that the gene is to
the human makeup as the thread in this suit is to the suit?

SINGER: No, the best way to look at it is that a gene is like a
sentence in an encyclopedia. It's a piece of information buried in the
genome, the whole encyclopedia, which is a vast store of information. The
gene instructs the cell how to do some one thing. All together, the
yh oo? oe cells in your body 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.

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

chip.
YT prefer
SINGER: It's a Chip-—but we-seubinase the old-fashioned analogy of a

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

10
information.

MOYERS: What are you trying to explore about it?

SINGER: 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 DNA
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. And then you turned six more pages, and you repeated
exactly the same jabberwock again--and two pages later, there it was
again. It doesn't look like a gene--that is to say, it doesn't look like
a meaningful sentence. I can't figure out what it is. And I'm certainly
confounded by the fact that it occurs so many times. My colleagues and I
are looking at a sentenss in ‘the human genome that occurs probably on the
order of 100,000 times, and altogether makes up about five percent of the
DNA in every cell. Why? We don't know. What is it doing? We don't
know. We do know that new copies of it can be made in sho human cell and
put in a new place in the DNA. And we know, thanks to the work of some
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 genomic jabberwock can pick itself up from one place in the
genome and settle down 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.

MOYERS: What is the value of finding this out?

SINGER: ‘The value is severalfold. First of all, if we can
understand what makes such a sequence move 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 DNA molecule. The analogy to

11
the encyclopedia falls down once you realize that DNA moves itself about

and changes in all of us, all the time. That's one of the things that

we'll learn, £&

 

MOYERS: There's a lot of talk in this city about the human genome
project, which will cost billions of dollars. What is it?

SINGER: To continue the analogy I've been using, it would be
equivalent to saying that we could write out tha encyclopedia for human
DNA, and that we would know all of the information in a human cell. We
would know how to find it, as we do when we look in an index of an
encyclopedia, or when we look up something alphabetically. We would know
how to turn to the gene that causes hemophilia when it's mutated. We
would know how to turn to the page that says this gene is going to be
important in causing a certain tumor. We would know how to look at that
gene in a person, and perhaps make some guesses as to whether that person
is likely to develop a certain tumor or not.

MOYERS: So if you knew that, then you could begin to think about
altering the gene to prevent the disease.

SINGER: The genome project is defined themmmmmpewWwery grandly. It
will do a lot of gia things along the way. It will tell us a lot about
ee genomes wae in other species, because one of the ways we'll do the
human genome project is by comparison with plants and yeast cells. One
element of science is comparison. You learn a tremendous amount by
comparing two things. This is like that, or this is not like that. Why
is it not like that? And what can we learn?

MOYERS: But 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 are going to be spent over a long period

12
of time. But the nice answer to your question, the grand and glorious
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.
The public will also be interested because it is with that knowledge that

we're going to beable to deal with starvation, to learn how to grow
plants in Africa that can't now be grown there. We're going to learn how
to deal with disease! We will improve the lot of all mankind.

MOYERS: -~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 doing this. We
can't even describe them. The reason we know that we will discover things
that we can't describe now is that this has been the history of science.
We do things to learn something we can define, and we wind up knowing
things we never imagined even asking about.

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

SINGER: Why aren't you sure? What bothers you?

MOYERS: I'll show you a picture from The Economist that illustrates
what scares people.

SINGER: Okay.

MOYERS: 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 something beyond human beings. That's one part of it.

SINGER: ‘The geep is something that someone did in order to leam

whether it could be done, but it's not something that people are going to

13
be making, except on an occasional experimental basis. And it is surely
not something that will ever be done with human beings in any similar way.

MOYERS: How can you say that with such certainty?

SINGER: Because scientists are human beings, as human as those who
are not scientists. They share the same values. The greatest resistance
to doing any genetic engineering on human beings has come from the
scientific comminity. There are very strong feelings within the
scientific community about doing genetic engineering on human beings. And
the evidence for that is the level of review and discussion within the
scientific community prior to doing even very small things--nothing that
comes even close to a geep. I talked before about correcting 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.

That's not really very different from therapies that we've used before
because they're designed to correct a certain disease. ts very
different in that it will be much more precise and effective, and will be
a better cure.

But even before thinking about that, there has been an extraordinary
level of conversation in the scientific community as well as in gatherings
of people from outside the community to come to some general notion about
what we think is useful to do--what is human, and what is humane, and what
is something that no one would ever do.

MOYERS: But in the end, the scientific conmmity is not itself
responsible for what happens to its discoveries. Your faith in humanity
is touching. It may be more so than the journalist's. But when engineers
created the oven, I don't think they expected a Christian nation in the

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

14
SINGER: What you're saying is something I would agree with. If the
knowledge 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.

MOYERS: ‘There's a will to use what we know.

SINGER: 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 developments in technology. To make technological and scientific
development 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 moral behavior have failed, the newer ways will fail,
too, because human beings will remain the way they are.

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 some
standards for the use of that knowledge?

SINGER: Of course there should be standards. 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 time when our concerns were not about misuses of human gene therapy,
but about the safety of the things that would be constructed. Scientists
now are spending enormous 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 ought to be. But if we
simply say no to everything, then we turn our backs on our abilities to
solve the very real problems that we have.

MOYERS: What do you see personally and scientifically as the dangers

in genetic engineering?

15
SINGER: I don't actually see dangers in gene therapy for genetic

diseases as long as they are carried out under the general kinds of
standards that we have come to apply to medical interventions in
general—-that the research should go on after review by knowledgeable
scientists and non-scientists; that things are done with the consent of
those on whom new practices are tried; that they are done in the context
of institutions which provide guidelines and monitoring 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-consuming. But it should help us derive the benefits that we want in
so many ways, and yet limit the possible dangers.

MOYERS: An interesting poll not long ago showed that forty percent
of the people in this country said they thought it was morally 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.

SINGER: I find those polls very puzzling. What they tell me is that
people lack an understanding of the sciences. The people who say, "I just
don't think it's right to meddle with these genes in this way" don't
understand enough about what we're doing to be able to sort out for
themselves what's right or wrong about it. In my judgment, there's
nothing profoundly wrong about it. We're been fooling with genes since
the beginning of time by breeding farm animals and plants for better
yields. In ancient times, and even now in some cultures, mates are chosen
for young people on the basis of what the family thinks the grandchildren
will be like. That's breeding human beings, and that's accepted. We're

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

16
People used to think that disease was a punishment. Smallpox, for
example, was viewed as a punishment for evil deeds that people did.
MOYERS: Yes, there was a man named John Woolman.

Ig** Century
SINGER: Yes, a famous o@f, member of the Society of Friends, a

A
marvelous man--but he believed that smallpox came from God.

MOYERS: --to instruct humans in virtue. Woolman was the same man
who was so opposed to slavery.

SINGER: Exactly. There are people now who believe that AIDS
represents the same kind of punishment. But smallpox didn't come asa
punishment to human 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. We have killed the smallpox virus. We don't have it anymore on the
face of the earth.

MOYERS: I've often wondered, if John Woolman came back today,
whether he would think that God had changed His mind.

SINGER: We are much better off for the absence of smallpox, and we
have not paid any price for its absence. There are people to this day who
look upon AIDS as a punishment. It's not. It's caused by a virus whose
structure we can describe in such a way that we can think about it
rationally and try to figure out ways to end the scourge that it has
brought on our society. These are the kinds of things that come only from
science.

MOYERS: You know, I hear you, and I believe you, but there are
common concerns out there that people keep telling me about genetic
engineering. Now these concerns may come out of a great ignorance,
including the ignorance and superficiality of journalism. But you hear

people saying, "Well, will it be possible for parents to seek hormones

17
that will produce a seven-foot basketball player so that I can raise my
kid to go out there and make money 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 engineering has
made growth hormone available cheaply. We need the growth hormone to
treat people who are diseased in the sense that they don't make it
themselves. It's available, and it's cheap. But people are buying it to
give to their children to make them good athletes. That's not a problem
of the scientist who cloned the human growth hormone gene in order to help
children who suffer from an absence of it and would be 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.

MOYERS: We're back to ethics.

SINGER: 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 phenomenon.

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

MOYERS: 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. I can
make a human growth hormone gene. There is no way to tell the difference
between the gene that I have made in the laboratory and the gene I would

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

18
given a quality they don't have simply because they come out of human
beings?

MOYERS: 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 about mucking around with it.

SINGER: We are special. And we are marvelous. pat there are many living
things in the world that are marvelous. How does it diminish our sense of
ourselves to understand that we are the product of a lot of molecules
coming together in a marvelous way? We are not those molecules, 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
from every other one. Modern genetics has told us that this is absolutely
true. Except for identical twins, no two of us have the same DNA
molecules. Biology says that each of us, with our different genetic
makeup, is unique. It's the same splendid notion that we came to fora
lot of other reasons--and biology underscores it. Knowing how we work in
no way diminishes our uniqueness. It in no way changes how we look upon
people we love. The physicist, Richard Feynman, asked why poets could
write about Jupiter when they thought Jupiter was like a man? What kind
of poet can't write about that same Jupiter if he knows that it's a great
whirling sphere of methane and ammonia? You look out at the sky, and you
look at Jupiter. It brings in all of us the same wonder, the same awe

about the universe. I think the astronomer has more awe and wonder

Ww _ that Is Ws
because he knows #hat it is Up there. His knowledge doesn't diminish awe

inedaija; it enhances it.

MOYERS: Do you think a biologist may have more awe and wonder for

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

SINGER: I know that's true. My wonder at the kinds of things that
we've learned in molecular biology beats anything that anybody can tell me
in grand terms about how extraordinary a human being is. How incredible
it is that a few changed genes have given us this tremendous gift of
language, of communication, of being able to write down our history, of
having culture, of drawing pictures, of making paintings. I think that I
appreciate that more, not less, because of what I know.

MOYERS: 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. For example, right over here in Maryland, at
the Agriculture Department's experimentation station, they have produced
pigs that turn out to be pathetically arthritic and deformed creatures
whose offspring are themselves deformed. ‘The animal rights people say we
don't have the right to do that to innocent creatures.

SINGER: It's very difficult to argue that we are special as human
beings without also arguing that we ought to pay special attention to our
own species. Within that special attention is the need to help those of
our species who suffer from disease, starvation, and so forth. One of the
best ways we have of trying to help that suffering is experimentation,
learning new information about how living things work. For many of the
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.

Now, there is no question but that work that has gone on in the past
hag misused aninals 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

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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 make advances,
curing our own ills, or improving our own situation. We do a lot of
things nowadays with cells that people used to do with animals. And there
are other ways to replace animals for certain kinds of experimentation.
But there are many things that we cannot do without animals.

MOYERS: So the animal rights people are not misguided in their
concern?

SINGER: The animal rights people are misguided in some of their
concerns, and in the extremes to which they go. But they also have a core
message which has been important. Many people within the scientific
community deal with the same questions that are raised by animal rights
people, but approach them in rational, thoughtful ways that are not
extreme, and that allow for a balance between our need to help our ow
special species, and our need to pay some attention to suffering animals.

MOYERS: How would you respond to the more severe critics of genetic
engineering, like Jeremy Rifkin, who says we had better be very careful
what we release into the environment, because we don't know enough yet
about the unintended consequences. Genetic engineering ought to be done
under only the most protected, sheltered, restricted circumstances
imaginable.

SINGER: let me say first of all that Jeremy Rifkin's view of the
situation is a very extreme one. Not many people take his view, although
we get the impression that they do because he is given a great deal of
space on television, and in newspapers and magazines.

The release of organisms, which Rifkin still speaks about, was, of

earliest Liest . .
course, the crux of the issue, and that was xaised not by Mr. Rifkin, but

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by scientists, including myself, in 1973 and 1974. It was the basis of a
discussion in the mid-seventies, which engaged the public, and which
resulted in the development of very strict guidelines by the National

Institutes of Health, guidelines which govern the way my colleagues and I
do

Now, Mr. Rifkin knows that very, wagy strict guidelines were put into
place and that, as a consequence of a great deal of new scientific
information, and consideration by scientists, ecologists, molecular
biologists, and physicians, those guidelines have been relaxed. He also
knows that there are still strict guidelines in place for those
experiments that have the remotest possibility of being dangerous, that
there is extensive review of experiments, and that there is extensive
monitoring of what goes on. He is still crying about such things even in
the face of a history of responsibility on the part of scientists and the
govermment 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.

MOYERS: It does seem that the scientific commmity, people like you,
have been responsible over the last years in trying to come to grips with
whatever possible dangers your experiments might pose. But you scientists
are always coming up with difficult predicaments for society at large.
Knowledge for knowledge's sake I happen to believe in, and that you have
to follow curiosity wherever it goes. But the issues that come out of
your research 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?

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Society has to grapple with the consequences of your research. But, as
you said in the beginning of this conversation, we are an illiterate
political and social republic when it comes to scientific knowledge. How
are we going to cope with the predicaments that you and your colleagues
are handing us almost daily?

SINGER: I don't think that we--and now I say "we" 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. People ought to know that we all get information in
the form of DNA from our parents, and that our competence and our
capabilities, both physical and mental, are to some extent dependent upon
that. We all ought to know that if you take down a great deal of green
stuff from the earth, you put less oxygen into the atmosphere. It's
amazing that most people don't know that the oxygen isn't just up there
for the taking, it's put there by living things called green plants.
People somehow think the oxygen was there from the beginning. It wasn't.

We have to appreciate certain fundamental kinds of things if we're
going to deal with these problems. And for the details, we're going to
need to bring scientists into the discourse. The President's science
advisor must give the President access to the best scientific information
in the country, for health purposes, for environmental purposes, for
defense, for weapons building--for all these things. Our success as a
nation and the success of the planet as a whole depends on scientific
discoveries, each of which hands us a new bag of problems. That's not

very different from the way the world has always been. There's no free

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lunch.

MOYERS: Except that we know so mich more now than we did, and
everything is so interconnected that every advance of knowledge creates a
different kind of political and social dilenma.

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 improves the music they hear on their hi-fi sets.
And yet there's the other side of it, the new problems that come from new
knowledge. We have this ambivalence. The only way to deal with these
problems is the hard way: look at them seriously, talk about them, and
evolve a way to deal with then.

MOYERS: 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 humanity than science.

MOYERS: Do you get mad at this image of the scientist as
Frankenstein and Strangelove?

SINGER: vet, I get angry with it.

MOYERS: What does it say to you?

SINGER: What does it say to me? It makes me angry with secondary
school teachers because it makes me realize that a lot of wonderful,
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 something
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 own

research. I'm not Watson or Crick or Weinberg, -for-thatematter. I learn

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small things.

But to learn something one day that nobody ever knew before is
something that everyone should have the chance to do. To the extent we're
turning off young people in our country from scientific careers—-quite
apart from the fact that we're turning them off from wonderful careers in
terms of good incomes and the availability of great jcbs—-we're turning
them off from the possibility of sharing in this 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 turns them off is that they think
that we scientists are somehow not part of the species, it's too bad.

MOYERS: You like your work, don't you, even if it means being
ostracized at a cocktail party or a dinner?

SINGER: Oh, that's a fair bargain, as far as I'm concerned. I was a
graduate student in 1953, when a Watson and Francis Crick announced
what a DNA molecule loolad like. They started an incredible forty years
for biology. They allowed us to understand things about living organisms
that as a graduate student I couldn't imagine. It isn't that the answers
were unimaginable~-the questions were unimaginable. So I've been part of
an extraordinary time in biology. There hasn't been a day when I've
wanted to do anything else.

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