Sir John Gurdon Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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I want to go back to your earlier career as a humanist, which you turned away from, because this work is raising a lot of big questions about who we are and where we might go. How do you think about that, or is it part of the profession of a scientist not to focus on those questions?
I do think about it and I shall say a bit about that today. My own view in short is that there is completely unjustifiable concern on these issues. People talk about the ethics of this, and they would say, for example, that if you transplant the nucleus of one of your skin cells into a donated egg from some woman, this will form an early, very early, embryo, and it would. And they say that is a potential human life. I would completely disagree with that on the grounds that it is not a potential life in the absence of implantation, a key step in [embryonic] development. I see this rather cynical way of people who are in good health, in high places, whether they're lawyers or whatever, sitting there and saying, "I'm fine but I don't like you to do these experiments which might, in fact, greatly improve the health of other people." I find that quite an unacceptable philosophy. I would say this early human embryo is actually not a potential life and has no significant validity. It may or may not have a soul, doesn't matter. The fact is, you're not killing anything that's significant. And if you don't do it, you're then not taking advantage in the way that we could of relieving an awful lot of human suffering.
So, it is that practical application and the intention here of the good that might be done that should define the process. Are there things that we should worry about in this process that might get out of control? What is your insight on that problem?
Yes. At the end of my talk today I shall go through five reasons why people might object to that, and one of the ones which I find particularly unpersuasive is what I call the "thin end of the wedge" argument. They say, "You scientists are doing this kind of thing. That's okay but we don't know what you'll do next. We'd better stop it quickly before anything worse happens." That's a very bad argument. So, I shall go through these points. I don't think any of them have any worthwhile validity, to be honest.
How do you see the commercialization of these insights ultimately being achieved? Will the scientific breakthrough lead the market to see the implications, and then it will happen on a broader scale?
That's an interesting question of whether there will be commercial gain from this kind. Let's assume the technology, like most, improves. People find out how to do a thing and it works better. It's unclear to me how commercially useful that will be. The end point of my work that I'm currently engaged in, if it were to go well, would be to understand what molecules you need to rejuvenate a nucleus and create a universal stem cell. Now if that were some special molecule which I could put a patent on, maybe there'd be money in that, but I rather doubt if it will work that way. So, I'm not sure that there is going to be a huge commercial consequence of this work, however successful it might be.
What would be your advice to students as they prepare for their future? Your career stands out as one where rejection paid off, once you chose to do what you wanted to do.
Yes. I'm very troubled that -- every now and then one has extremely gifted Ph.D. students, and I'm lucky enough to have those from time to time, and almost without exception the recent ones have all given up science and gone into the finance world. I regret that, and I'd like to say to them: "Consider yourselves at the end of your career. You will have probably made a large amount of money, and you'll have an expensive car and a big house, and you can take holidays wherever you want, but is that really what you want out of your life? Or would you rather say that what you've been able to do is to make a real difference to the quality of human life by relieving suffering in the way that centuries later, they say, 'Oh, Dr. Kreisler, [he] actually did some of this work which has helped the whole of human society?' rather than 'you have actually made enough money to live comfortably.'" So, I would hope that progressively people will be prepared to look at their life as a whole, and look at the end point, other than in simply financial terms.
When I was young, a scientific career was highly regarded as a good career, and I think it's unfortunately less so now, largely because it's very poorly rewarded, at least in Europe, financially. So, people have to suffer. But in the long run, that will probably change.
What, looking down the road, should the general public be watching for in terms of milestones? Are there certain questions out there in this work that you're describing we hope to be getting the answers to?
Do you mean, what they should be looking towards as a positive effect, not worrying about a negative effect?
Yes, right, a positive [effect].
What can they hope for?
In other words, in this realm of questions that you're dealing with, [is there] one that stands out that needs to be answered in the next stage to achieve these positive developments?
In my opinion, the single most important steps will be to understand how this rejuvenation process actually works. We, and others, are beginning to pick away at that problem. To give you some feeling for it, we have to know what it is that removes the marks, as they're called, that make a set of genes specialized. So, as you have your cells becoming, say, skin cells, they switch off, as we've said, the genes needed for the brain. They're there, but they're not very easily activated, and they require marks -- for example, methylation of DNA is one such thing. We know actually nothing at the moment about how that is reversed. It is reversed [but] we have no idea how it's done. But if it isn't reversed, the whole process won't work. So, you can divide the whole process into a few steps like that.
That's what we will be watching for, to see as people gradually find a way of reversing these marks. That gets it back to the beginning again, and then, of course, you have to start telling it in which direction to go after that. This reversal process is undoubtedly complicated, but I'm quite sure it will eventually be worked out.
Those are the steps which will ultimately -- if it really works well, just give you a feeling for this -- I would say eventually we should be able to take a skin cell and apply these molecules (by then we will have found out what they are), to that skin cell, to directly switch it back into an embryonic cell from which you can derive heart, muscle, brain, and so on. That's the ultimate vision one would have of this.
One final question. Where do you think the leadership will be in these new directions? Do you think the politics of some countries unnamed will affect its future leadership role? Because although in your mind a lot of these ethical issues are resolved, they have become political issues in some countries.
I would doubt whether the constraints or restrictions which do apply in this country, and even more in some others, are really holding up progress significantly at the moment. It's unrealistic to do experiments with human eggs, just an inefficient way of doing it, and once you know how a thing works in a mouse egg, or even in a fish or frog egg, the principles usually turn out to be similar. So, if we really knew how it worked in a mouse, for example, it wouldn't be that difficult to switch over to humans, and I would assume that by then, any public concern will have evaporated. Let me give an example: the in vitro fertilization, as we call it, was invented primarily by Bob Edwards in Britain, as it happens. In the first two years when he did that, he got terrible abuse, bad press, letters [from] people threatening his life, etc. They said, "it's unnatural, we don't like this"; but in a couple of years it turned out to be very useful and the whole thing completely forgotten. So, I think what will happen in the world is people will realize that this is a really valuable direction to follow, and these reservations will just evaporate.
Sir John, on that hopeful note, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to be here today, and thank you for delivering the Hitchcock lectures on the campus. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your interesting questions and discussion.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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