The issue of stem-cell availability is another front in this battle. In the summer of 2001, just after his first State of the Union, President Bush issued an executive order restricting federal research money to seventy-eight previously harvested lines of stem cells. These lines were cultivated between 1998, when human embryonic stem cells were first isolated, and that 2001 moment further research was nixed. “The problem,” explains Weissman, “is that all seventy-eight lines come from people who utilize in vitro fertilization clinics. IVF clinics serve a very specific segment of the American population. The stem cell lines are taken from rich, white, infertile people. One of the fundamental principles of bioethics is distributed justice. That means when scientists work on medical cures, they want to develop cures for everyone — not just rich, white, infertile people.”
The impact of Bush’s order was considerable. Almost immediately, University of California, San Francisco stem cell pioneer Roger Pedersen packed his bags and his lab and moved to England, a country with no restrictions on this research. Other nations, including Israel, Japan, France, and Australia, have also declared their friendliness to the work. Singapore took an even more aggressive stance, calling itself an “international center for stem cell study,” then breaking ground on a $15 billion research park and quickly poaching top US scientists — including, for example, Edison Liu, once a leading scientist at America’s National Cancer Institute and now the head of Singapore’s new Genome Institute.
These developments have proven especially troubling for California, which is far and away the nation’s leader in biotech research. To give this a little context, in 2002, Californian biotech firms were granted over 19,000 patents. The next closest state was New York, with 6,100. Yet California also took a $12 billion dollar hit in the dot-com crash of 2001 and is running an annual budget deficit close to $35 billion. In other words, now and moving forward, the biotech industry is absolutely critical to California’s survival.
To combat the brain drain and bring more biotech money into California, state Senator Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) introduced Senate Bill 253, which allows the use of state funds and private donations for stem cell research within California. It was signed into law on September 20, 2002, with Governor Gray Davis telling reporters: “By signing SB 253, we have opened the door to important life-saving research in California . . . We fully expect stem-cell research to attract world-renowned scientists to our state. Currently, there are 2,500 biomedical companies in California that employ 225,000 people. During 2000, this industry paid its employees $12.8 billion. While this life-saving research will continue to bring the necessary funding into the state, it will more importantly save lives.”
Not interested in losing their own shot at the “necessary funding” and almost immediately after the bill’s passage, four other states — Rhode Island, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania — enacted similar legislation. Both Massachusetts and New Mexico are now considering similar proposals. Ironically, the use of states’ rights to bypass federal control has lately been a Republican tactic, especially favored by evangelical Christians in their attempts to ban abortions (and block gay marriage), but here co-opted by liberal Democrats. Another tactic long favored by conservative Republicans in their attempt to oust lefty values from the crevices of government has been the creation of special-interest lobbying groups and their ruthless application of pressure.
As it turns out, two can play at that game.
5.
Jerry Zucker is the creator of his own brand of movies, a genre of wacky comedy that began with Kentucky Fried Movie, was perfected in Airplane!, and includes both the Naked Gun and Police Squad franchises. Without question, he’s Hollywood royalty. But unlike other Tinseltown royals, Zucker has never been especially political. That would change.
In 2000, Zucker found out that his eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, had juvenile diabetes. Immediately, he began researching the disease. A year later, he started hearing stories about stem cells and how they might be able to not just provide better treatment for Katie, but could actually provide a cure for the disease. This was also when he heard that the Bush administration was working hard to halt this work. “As a director,” says Zucker, “I tend to be calm. I try not to get carried away or lose my cool. I don’t want to be another Hollywood maniac. [But] what was going on with stem cells made me very angry.”
Through sad circumstance, Zucker and his wife, Janet, got to know producer Douglas Wick (Gladiator, Stuart Little, and Working Girl), and his wife, Lucy Fisher, the former vice chairman of Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. Wick and Fisher also have a daughter with juvenile diabetes. In the summer of 2002, this foursome formed the stem cell research advocacy group Cures Now, hired a lobbyist, and went to Washington. They took their daughters and Caltech biologist David Anderson along. It was, as Zucker explains, an educational crusade meant to exert considerable pressure: “We would walk in to a senator’s office with my daughter and her insulin pump attached to her belt and ask them what was more important — my daughter’s life or the life of a couple of cells?”
Cures Now had an impact. One of their early converts was Utah Republican pro-life advocate Orrin Hatch. Centenarian Strom Thurmond also joined their cause. And Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle agreed not to put a Senate stem cell bill on the floor for a vote until Cures Now had a chance to talk to everyone who would listen.
A lot of that talk has involved Zucker and Co. trying to separate fact from fiction. Over the past few years, there has been a concerted effort among stem cell foes on the religious right and within the Bush administration to conflate therapeutic cloning (which produces stem cells) with reproductive cloning (which produces carbon-copy humans). This is also where Leon Kass comes into the story.
Dubbed “The President’s Ethics Cop” by Time, Kass is a University of Chicago bioethicist and was head of Bush’s influential Council on Bioethics, which is charged with advising Congress and the administration on stem cells. A few years back, Kass wrote a now-famous article for the New Republic, “Preventing a Brave New World or Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now,” explaining the mechanics of somatic cell nuclear transfer — the main way scientists obtain stem cells.
What is cloning? Cloning . . . is the production of individuals who are genetically identical to an already existing individual. The procedure’s name is fancy — “somatic cell nuclear transfer” — but its concept is simple. Take a mature but unfertilized egg; remove or deactivate its nucleus; introduce a nucleus obtained from a specialized (somatic) cell of an adult organism. Once the egg begins to divide, transfer the little embryo to a woman’s uterus to initiate a pregnancy. Since almost all the hereditary material of a cell is contained within its nucleus, the re-nucleated egg and the individual into which it develops are genetically identical to the organism that was the source of the transferred nucleus.
Scientifically, Kass is correct, except — and this is a big except — the somatic cell nuclear transfer process actually stops short of transplanting that egg into a woman’s uterus. What Kass knows, but is choosing not to acknowledge here, is that once that new egg begins to divide, it can be used to either create stem cells or to create a carbon copy human. But it’s an either-or. Using somatic cell nuclear transfer to create stem cells actually destroys the embryo. Moreover, almost no one wants to see the technology used for reproductive cloning. Pretty much every mainstream scientist, including Irv Weissman and Larry Goldstein, are seriously opposed to this procedure. But, because the subject is tricky and the news media tends to prefer sexy headlines to complicated reporting, Kass’s conflation had an impact.
In the spring of 2001, a pair of cloning bills was introduced — one in the House, one in the Senate — that outlaw all forms of cloning (both reproductive and therapeutic), with severe penalties of up to $1 million and ten years in prison for either doing research in this field or receiving medical treatment based on that research. This means, if the French invent a stem cell–bas
ed cure for Alzheimer’s, and you go to Paris for treatment and then try to reenter the United States, well, you go straight to jail.
The original House bill went nowhere, but it was quickly rewritten and reintroduced by Dave Weldon (R-Florida) and became known as the Weldon Bill. The debate surrounding the bill should have been about stem cells. It should have been about the facts. Instead, because of conflation, it was about the ramifications of human cloning, or, more specifically, eugenics, the commodification of humanity, setting a proper moral example, and — of course — the Nazis. The House passed the Weldon Bill in three hours.
6.
Irv Weissman’s kitchen is a sprawling affair. It is large and rectangular and filled with a full compliment of shiny stainless steel appliances. On the evening of December 11, 2002, Weissman stands among those appliances, wearing a long chef’s apron and a serious expression. He has a wineglass in one hand and a long wooden ladle in the other and is staring intensely at the goose he is preparing for dinner.
Seated around a long table are Weissman’s guests, which tonight include his sister Lauren, once a Hollywood producer and now the executive director of Cures Now; Leroy Hood, another top scientist and the man who invented the DNA sorter that sequenced the human genome; and Ann Tsukamoto, a scientist with StemCells, Inc. The group has gathered to celebrate an announcement made the day prior at Stanford, when the institution declared its plans to capitalize on $12 million of anonymously donated seed money and build a $120 million Institute for Stem Cell Biology to be headed up by Weissman. In other words, in the war over stem cells, Stanford just declared itself the Western Front.
And make no mistake, the research they plan to do there is much needed. Building on Weissman’s previous work with blood-forming stem cells, the Stanford institute will initially focus on discovering the stem cells that become the other major organs of the body — that way, if these organs become cancerous, they’ll have new ways to fight the disease.
“It’s not only new ways to fight the disease,” says Weissman, taking a break from goose-cooking duties to join the conversation. “That’s only the first step. We also know that there are cancer-forming stem cells. If we can isolate these, we can get to the very root of every type of cancer. This would give us new, biologically specific targets for drugs. And because the institute is in this state, California will be the first place these therapies will come out. Our biotech companies will produce them, and Californians will get the first crack at these treatments.”
As expected, Stanford’s announcement sparked a firestorm. The media jumped on the news, with the dangers of human cloning getting heavy play. The Associated Press, the first outlet to cover the story, began its article: “Stanford has said its new cancer institute will conduct stem cell research using nuclear-transfer techniques — work that many consider to be cloning of human cells.” ABC News followed suit: “The president believes that the creation and destruction of embryos for the purpose of research or reproduction is morally wrong. He is against cloning of any kind and feels there are other biomedical research avenues.”
Of course, Leon Kass also issued a press release. “Stanford has decided to proceed with cloning research without public scrutiny and deliberation,” he wrote, then went on to say that the President’s Council on Bioethics wants a four-year moratorium on therapeutic cloning and does not endorse the Stanford Institute. Oddly, no such moratorium has ever been recommended and Kass issued this statement without consulting anyone else on the council — so no one besides Kass was ever asked if they supported the institute.
Not that any of this is surprising. After all, what’s a little deception in the face of the bigger war — a war that is far from over. The cloning debate rages at all levels of the government, recently refueled by the UFO-worshipping Raelians’ 2003 announcement that they had created the world’s first human clone. Never mind that, just prior to that announcement, the Bush administration blocked a worldwide U.N. ban on reproductive cloning that might have stopped the Raelians in their supposed work. The ban was vetoed because it did not also include therapeutic cloning and was insufficient for the religious right. Meanwhile, a middle-of-the-road estimate of how many Americans will die from diseases that stem cell research might soon cure is 130 million.
Back at the stove, Weissman lays down his spoon and nods his head: “This goose is cooked.”
Hacking the President’s DNA
THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLAYING GOD
Cowritten with Andrew Hessel and Marc Goodman
A couple months after I finished the first draft of this book, I sent it to author Howard Bloom for feedback. In his response, Howard went off on the kind of delicious, head-spinning tangent for which he is famous. Along the way, he also managed to sum up both the ideas in this chapter and the ideas in this book as a whole.
Technically, this chapter is about the upstart field of synthetic biology — a technology with both incredible and dangerous implications. But before we get to those dangers, it’s worth pausing to consider what’s really going on here. Synthetic biology unlocks one of the universe’s deepest secrets — the mystery of life, the formula for creation. It is quite a long step forward.
Or, as Howard Bloom so eloquently puts it: “It’s time to abandon the Greek idea that hubris is bad and face a simple fact — hubris is what the cosmos seems to want from us. We humans are pushing beyond the boundaries of what this cosmos has ever achieved. And that is what the cosmos seems to ache for. She has torn up her old rules over and over again. Once upon a time this universe made a big bang from nothing; then she made quarks and leptons from a raw rush of time, space, and speed. But that didn’t satisfy her. She ripped up the rules again and made atoms, galaxies, stars, life, and mind. In our acts of invention, we are not defacing nature; we are upgrading her. And radical self-improvement is what nature has been about for 13.8 billion years. That’s what this book is about. It’s about humans who have the audacity to change the nature of reality. It’s about humans who have the audacity to join in nature’s creative process, in her quest for more than mere self-improvement, in her quest for self reinvention. Radical self-reinvention.”
1.
This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously. In the early 2000s, businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowdsourced to a larger group via the Internet. Initially, offerings were simple. We crowdsourced the design of T-shirts (Threadless.com) and the writing of encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com), but it didn’t take long for the trend to start making inroads into the harder sciences. Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into new and novel proteins were being done this way. With the fundamental tools of genetic manipulation — tools that cost millions of dollars not ten years ago — dropping precipitously in price, the crowdsourced design of biological agents was just the next logical step.
In 2008, casual DNA design competitions with small prizes arose; then, in 2011, with the launch of GE’s $100 million cancer challenge, the field moved onto serious contests. By early 2015, as personalized gene therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine’s bleeding edge, viral design sites began to appear where people could upload information about their disease, and virologists could post designs for a customized cure. Medically speaking, it all made perfect sense: Nature has done eons of excellent design work on viruses. With a little, relatively simple retooling, they were perfect vehicles for drug delivery.
It didn’t take long for these sites to be flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even designer psychoactive drugs — all appeared on the menu. What people did with these biodesigns was anybody’s guess. No international body had yet been created to watch over them.
So, in December 2015, when a first-time visitor named Captain Capsid posted a challenge on the viral design website 99Virions, no alarms sounded;
it was just one of the hundred design requests submitted that day. Captain Capsid might have been some consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and the challenge just another attempt to understand the radically shifting R&D landscape — really, he could have been anyone — but the problem was interesting nonetheless. Plus, Capsid was offering $500 for the winning design, not a bad sum for a few hours work.
Later, 99Virion’s log files would show that Captain Capsid’s IP address originated in Panama, although this was likely spoofed. The design specification itself raised no red flags. Written in SBOL, an open-source language similar to XML and popular with the synthetic biology crowd, it seemed like a standard vaccine request. So people just got to work, as did the automated computer programs that had been written to “auto-evolve” new designs. These algorithms were getting quite good, now winning over 30 percent of the challenges.
In less than twelve hours, 243 designs were submitted, most by these computerized expert systems. But the winner, GeneGenie27, was actually human — a twenty-year-old Columbia University undergrad with a knack for virology. His design was quickly forwarded to GENeBAY, a thriving Shanghai-based biomarketplace. Less than sixty seconds later, an Icelandic synthesis startup got the contract to turn the 5,984-base-pair blueprint into actual, doubled-stranded DNA. Twenty-four hours after that, a package of 10 mm fast-dissolving microtablets was dropped in a FedEx envelope and handed to a courier.
Two days later, Samantha, a sophomore political science major at Harvard University, received the package. Thinking it contained a new, synthetic psychedelic, she slipped the tab into her left nostril and walked over to her closet. By the time Samantha had finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve and a few strands of DNA had crossed into the cells of her nasal mucosa.
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