Professor Henry T. Greely Discusses the New Center for Law and the Biosciences

Professor Henry (Hank) Greely is the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford. 

First of all, why a Center for Law and the Biosciences, and why at Stanford?  How did you get involved with this idea?

Prof. Greely: What I do, and what I think there’s a need for is to look with a lawyer’s knowledge at science and society and try to figure out, first, where the science is likely to go.  Second, if the science goes that way, what will the effects be on society?  How will things change?  Who will win, who will lose? 

Third, I try to offer my own opinion on which of these changes would be good and which would be bad ... without implying a judgmental role that I don’t think I have.  And then the fourth step is proposing interventions that try to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of that science.

So for example, with genetic testing, I was involved in the mid-to-late '90s in studies of genetic testing for breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.  We tried to figure out where the science was going, what the effects of the ability to test for strong predispositions to those diseases would be, and whether those effects were good or bad.  We proposed some policy changes to try to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits.

So that’s what I do, and I think that’s what John Barton also has largely done in his career.  And I hope the Center for Law and the Biosciences can be a focus for work at the law school and the university aimed at understanding and predicting the social effects of new biological technologies, and proposing legal changes to deal with them.

How much of the center’s work will focus on research being done at Stanford, and how much interest will there be in research elsewhere or in industry?

Prof. Greely: Well, you know, in the biological sciences, Stanford is a fantastic institution, so almost all the interesting work is being done here by somebody.  But there’s no special priority to looking into work that’s being done at Stanford.  It’s also being done everywhere else.  There’s an enormous investment of energy, time, and money around the world in bioscience research.  So most of what we’ll look at will have some people doing it here at Stanford and lots of people elsewhere, both in academia and industry, working on the same sorts of issues.

  

“I think most of the students who will be involved in the Center for Law and Biosciences won’t go on to be academics or policy experts in think tanks.  Most of them will go on to be practicing lawyers.  But they will, in those roles, also be able to put to use for the good of their clients and the good of society their sophistication about the interaction of law and biology.  This is true whether they’re writing patent applications, advising a bio-tech startup, or acting as in-house counsel for a pharmaceutical company.  To be sophisticated about where the science is going – how it could affect society and how society may react to that – will be a very useful set of skills.”

Will there be active links between the center and the new Bio-X program?

Prof. Greely: I’m on the faculty leadership council for Bio-X, so I do link the two myself, in terms of knowing what’s going on here and knowing what’s going on over there.  We’ll have to see how the relationship between the two evolves. 

I think the other group on campus that we’ll most definitely be working closely with would be the Stanford Center for Bio-Medical Ethics.  I’m the chair of the steering committee of that, and we’ll work closely with them.  Our focus would be more directly on legal issues; they have a broader focus, but the two organizations should be very complementary.

What kind of student involvement do you see resulting from the new center?

Prof. Greely: I think the students are absolutely essential.  First, we have great students.  They’re really smart, they’re hardworking, they’re fun, and a lot of them have backgrounds and interests in biological sciences.  For the last few years, close to ten percent of the incoming class has had some significant bio background.  Either they’re MDs, they’re PhDs, they’ve got Masters in various bio fields, or they’ve been undergraduate majors.

The center will try to support, in every way we can, research and writing they want to do on those kinds of interests.  We hope to work closely with the new student group BioLaw and with SLATA, the Stanford Law And Technology Association, in planning joint activities.  The center’s kickoff conference this February [entitled “Unnatural Selection; Should California Regulate Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis?”] is going to be coordinated with BioLaw’s first conference [entitled “Brave New Law: Biotechnology and Human Reproduction”].

At the very least, what I’d like to do is have the center sponsor and host a conference every year, sponsor quarterly lectures by major figures in the field, and then sponsor other smaller workshops, talks, seminars, as the opportunities arise.

What do you think the role will be for academic law programs such as these, in terms of industry-based research?

Prof. Greely: Well there really is no industry-based research doing the sorts of things we’re doing.  There’s an interesting, long-standing question about what’s different – good and bad – about industry research in science versus university research in science.  But the industry doesn’t really pay any attention to where things are going, what the effects will be on society, other than occasionally wondering how they’re going to market whatever they come up with.

I think that this whole idea of trying to predict and ameliorate the effects of new technology is a relatively new one.  If you look back, arguably the biggest and most important technical change in the 20th century in the U.S. was the automobile.  It changed the way our cities are laid out, it changed death rates, it changed everything.  But nobody in 1910 asked Ford how the Model T was going to change the world.  I think we’ve learned since then that it’s a good idea to give some forethought to how things are going to effect the world.  It’s still an open question as to whether any of that foresight will actually be helpful.

Do you have any ideas about how pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), for instance, will change the way we think about reproduction?

Prof. Greely: It depends in part on how it’s regulated, and it depends on how the science develops – not so much the process of PGD but the science of genetics.  However, if it develops the way I think it’s most likely to develop, parents going through in vitro fertilization in the near future are likely to have the opportunity to make lots of choices about their children’s genetic traits.  The easier ones will be things like sex, hair color, eye color, skin color, height; not unbounded choices, these cosmetic choices will be limited to what exists in the parents’ genes, what the parents bring to the child through the egg and the sperm.  If you create 12 embryos, you can test them all and give the parent a little description of what each of those embryos is likely to grow up like. 

Now, if we’re able to predict genetically other traits – personality traits or cognitive abilites, various skills – that could be an even greater change.  And I don’t know how I feel about it, actually.  That’s part of the reason I wanted to do a conference on this.  I don’t know what I think should be done.

Where do you look for answers to what should be done?

Prof. Greely: I try to figure out what the likely effects are more broadly, listen to a lot of people with their views on what the effects are going to be, and argue about how likely the scientists are to go way or the other.  Oftentimes, it’s very easy to say, “Well, if the world changes this way I don’t like it,” or “I don’t think that would be a good change,” either from a utilitarian or a non-utilitarian, deontological perspective.

But what makes this one particularly tricky is, for me at least, as a parent, I know that parents not only have the legal ability but have, culturally, the duty to change their children.  We’re supposed to raise them to be good people, and we do it from environmental inputs rather than conscious selection of particular genetic traits, but our goal is to mold our children to some extent.  After a while, we realize that it’s only to a limited extent they’re capable of being molded.  But does it change?  Is it different to try to mold them through picking their genetic traits than to mold them by influencing their environment?  It’s not convincing to me that it is, but on the other hand it feels very worrisome to me.  So I want to hear more.

How will you measure the success of the Center for Law and the Biosciences – publications, inventions, securing of funding, cooperation with other departments?

Prof. Greely: Ideas.  How many good ideas we help bring to life and disseminate.

What are your interests?  What are you currently working on right now and are you publishing anything?

Prof. Greely: I’ve just finished a paper on some issues in the changes in neuroscience law.  It’s a background paper for an AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] workshop in a couple weeks and will later be published in a book in Canada.  That’s part of the broader interest I’ve got: I think neuroscience is where genetics was, about 15 years ago.  It’s really at the edge of taking off and holds lots of potential for affecting our lives.

I’m writing a paper for a sports law conference called “Disability Enhancement in the Arena of Sports,” looking at enhancement issues primarily, which in a way gets back to PGD.  If we allow athletes, distance runners, to train at high altitudes, this is good for them because their body produces more red blood cells at high altitudes, because of the lower oxygen levels.  And therefore they can transmit more oxygen in their blood.  The disadvantages of that are stroke and such, but we have no prohibition on that kind of training. 

You can do the same thing by taking a bio-tech drug called erythropoietin. That’s illegal; it will get you thrown out of the race and suspended from the sport.

The current controversy is over people who sleep in tents that keep the oxygen level low.  They’re training at sea level but sleeping in a simulated high altitude, which again increases the number of red blood cells. 

Well ... how do you figure out what makes one of those clearly right, one of those clearly not OK, and one in the middle? 

Sports provides a nice way of looking at these issues for a couple of reasons.  Unlike, say, enhancement in education of the workforce, sports has nice clear rules, rules that officials regularly have to enforce and make decisions on.  And sports is a maximizing activity where people don’t just try to be good enough, they try to be their very best; which makes these enhancement technologies more likely to be first used in sports.  So I think it’s an interesting question in and of itself.  What should sports do in response to interventions that can help compensate for disabilities and then help improve someone beyond normal?  And our response to this question also may serve as a useful model, or example for the rest of society in coping with enhancement technologies.  I think these enhancement issues are really interesting.

And then the other thing I’m writing right now is on an experiment that would produce, if it works, a mouse with a brain made up of human neurons.  Whether that’s appropriate, inappropriate, how we should think about that kind of experiment. 

So those are my three current short-term projects.  And my longer-range project is to write a book about genetics and the law.

What effects will law have on the future of the biosciences – will the law have a restraining role, an advisory role, an ethical role, or none of the above?

Prof. Greely: It can be all of the above.  The sciences, whether they like it or not, live within a social context regulated by both law and nonlegal sanctions.  We as a society can and do in a variety of ways control what science gets done, and law is one of our main paths for doing that. 

More importantly, or maybe more oddly, you might ask why lawyers should be involved in this. 

OK. Why should lawyers be involved in questions that are usually answered by science and business?

Prof. Greely: I think lawyers play a critical role – in many areas, we serve as the lubricant, as the grease, as the people who understand or can make themselves understand different sides of a problem and smooth the way for a good resolution. 

So the scientists know where the science is going, but they don’t have an idea of what its effect is likely to be on society or how to intervene.  Social scientists or business-people, on the other hand, might in some cases have some ideas about its effect on society, but they don’t necessarily have a good idea about how to intervene to deal with it.  Lawyers can thus play a really important role because of our understandings of how government regulation works, and our ability to learn how technical changes are likely to unfold and how they are going to affect the society.  We can play a unique role in trying to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of new technology.

So you’re generalists, in a way?

Prof. Greely: Yeah, we’re the last of the great generalists.