Alta Charo, a 2019-20 CASBS fellow, is a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. Host John Markoff spoke with Charo about the ethics of genome editing in the fields of ecology and human biology. Shout out to CASBS information manager Jason Gonzales for opening this episode for us!
She recommends checking out the documentary “Human Nature,” in which she appears.
Learn about CRISPR gene editing
Revive & Restore, the organization working on “genetic rescue” of endangered and extinct species.
The controversy over He Jiankui’s genetic modification of human embryos
CASBS staff member Jason Gonzales read this episode's opening line. Woohoo!
Announcer: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Narrator: Today, host John Markoff sits down with Alta Charo, Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. Charo has been a legal analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and a senior policy advisor at the FDA. She co-chaired the National Academy of Medicine committees on embryonic stem cell research and genome editing, and most recently was on the WHO Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing. The two discuss the ethics of introducing genetically modified organisms into the wild and similar issues involving the resurrection of extinct species. We'll also hear about the intersection of law and bioengineering through the lens of the controversy surrounding the Chinese scientist who in 2018 announced that he had edited the DNA of a pair of human twins. And lastly, we'll hear some of Charles's reflections on the line between academic research and business and her hopes that the global community of genetic scientists can coalesce around a basic set of principles.
John Markoff: I wanted to ask, you know, your backstory. How did you get into your— what drew you to your interest in these, these new biotechnologies and their societal impact? Go back to wherever you started.
Alta Charo: Wow, um, it's a story of happy accidents, I think. Starting from when I was in high school, actually. So I was in high school in the early 1970s, and it was a time when there were these really interesting debates around nature versus nurture. You saw some really provocative science being done on the biology of behavior and assertions about intelligence and such. And I found myself really quite drawn to those discussions, and they were this mix of science and policy. Those two interests kind of stayed with me all the way through college where I was a biology major. I thought at the time I was going to work on environmental issues. And so I focused on ecology and evolutionary theory and was all set to go to graduate school working, I hoped, on primate behavior. But some events in my personal life left me in one of those moods where you just throw everything up in the air and go to heck with it. And at the urging of some friends, I I wound up taking the LSATs. And my GRE scores were quite respectable, but the LSAT scores were better. And so it was a "what color is your parachute" moment. And I went to law school saying, OK, now I'm going to be an environmental lawyer. And that was good because I'd watched people with a master's in biology photocopying at the Sierra Club. But people who spent one more year in school and got a JD were litigating. So it made sense unless you're going to go through to the doctorate. And so I was all, I was all focused on environmental law. I found myself working closely with a professor in that field and then wound up getting sidetracked by some of the projects that we did and some of the grant proposals that we wrote at my first area of employment, which was the Legislative Drafting Service. With that, I wound up getting a job with Congress, presumably to work on the first environmental distribution of genetically engineered organisms, the old Ice Minus Strawberries. And I came to Washington in August of 1986 at the end of a Fulbright teaching in France and was all set to start working on genetically engineered organisms and environmental issues and wound up getting traded like a baseball player to the infertility team. And so that was what led me to reproductive rights, reproductive technologies, embryo research. And it took 25 years until I went to the FDA and found myself working on genetics of food to circle back to the original interests. But they've all hooked up now. They've all connected now.
John Markoff: In your talk, you were focusing on issues of modern technologies like CRISPR and the human species, but have you looked at the dextrose extinction question at all? Is that on your radar?
Alta Charo: It absolutely is on my radar. And in fact, I'm going to be participating in an intensive workshop on exactly that issue at the end of June here in the Bay Area. Because while not promoting the idea of bringing back species willy-nilly into a different environment and a different ecosystem, there is a role for what we would call intended consequences of genetic engineering, and a role for not only looking at the risks of introducing new organisms, but also at looking at how one might model the implications to the point at which we think the benefits will outweigh the risks. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon, but it's an emerging area of science, and of course, when you've got a provocative figure like George Church speaking about a provocative animal, right, like the woolly mammoth, you wind up giving people the idea that you want to go back to Jurassic Park and, um, basically only watch the beginning of the movie and lose the lessons of the end. Um, that's not the goal here.
John Markoff: Well, and so this stuff is really quite real. You know, I've been following, because I'm working on Stewart Brand's biography, the organization he created, Revive and Restore, which of course is associated with Church. So they're going down that path, but they're also doing the restore part of the equation is fascinating to me. And, you know, the species that I find most interesting is what you might be able to do by genetically modifying various types of coral to give them the ability to withstand bleaching in a climate, you know, changed environment. And to me, that's a very clear, or it's a, you know, it fits more in your model, I guess, of intended consequences.
Alta Charo: It's not about bringing back extinct species. It's about helping current species protect themselves against becoming extinct. So yes, your example of the coral is certainly one that has come up, and yet even there one needs to be very careful that whatever change you make is not one that's going to bite you in the future as the environment continues to evolve. Coral reefs are very complicated ecosystems with many, many different kinds of fish and microorganisms that are living symbiotically with the coral or in some kind of relationship with the coral. So one of the tricks that you can work on is making changes that are either reversible or self-limiting, or for which there is already a plan for a mitigating effect if you don't like the full range of effects that you've now achieved with your initial engineering. And those, by the way, are projects that the Department of Defense has been working on for a while now. So their Safe Genes project is aimed at all of those things right now.
John Markoff: And what do you think of George Church's sort of, this was his glib response to me as a reporter a number of years ago is, you know, this technology is so powerful. It was, we were talking about CRISPR. If we make a mistake, we can simply, as you say, reverse it. I think he was being pretty sanguine, but I mean, you know, how powerful is the technology? Do you think we can correct the mistakes we make?
Alta Charo: It's context dependent. So for example, if I make a change, and this was discussed at a recent conference at UCSF, right here again in the Bay Area, If I make a change in a fetus in utero in order to correct the genetic defect that would have what we would call systemic effects, that is after birth many organ systems would be affected, so it's not so easy to try to do therapy after birth. Change the gene while the organs are still developing. It's not heritable. It doesn't affect your sperm or eggs or the next generation, but it does give you whole body influence that will be to the benefit of the child. Reversing that, not so easy since it's systemic, as opposed to something else where what you're going to do is make a single change in a particular organ. And it's a, it's a change that only affects a limited number of cells. And one could imagine then being able to come up with a system by which you could re-edit to return it to its original state if that's what you needed to do. So I think it's always about context. Okay.
John Markoff: And then in terms of the, where are we? Is this still hypothetical or are there regulatory realities and legal cases that are at play right now that are dealing with these issues?
Alta Charo: There are lots of laws and regulations. What makes it hard to explain though, is that we can't say that there's a law for biotechnology or a law for genetically engineered XYZ, because in the United States, we don't regulate the technology, we regulate the applications. So I need to talk to you generally about how do we regulate food. And then once you understand the system for regulating food, I can say now, if it's genetically engineered food, here's how it fits within that system. And in fact, in that system, um, most foods go on the market without any prior limit unless there's some reason to think that they're novel, and, uh, then they need to go through a particular kind of pre-market review. But that's rare. Most Most foods are made up of what we would call generally recognized as safe components. So if you use genetic engineering to produce a product that is just like the products already on the market, you just produced it more efficiently, then it's gonna be recognized as safe. There's nothing different. If you make a product that has a small change, but you understand how the change functions, now we're into that gray zone because it's novel, but there's no reason to think it's dangerous. And so there we have a system of voluntary submission to the FDA for premarket clearance of sorts. When it comes to drugs, on the other hand, using genetic engineering can introduce questions, specifically when you're dealing with biologics, about how you ensure, during the manufacturing process, adequate purity and adequate potency. And so there, you may need to actually have some special rules. That will govern that kind of production process. And we could go through the entire list of all the ways you could use genetic engineering. Plants that the FDA— that the USDA regulates as potential plant pests might or might not have to be given the special kind of lengthy review and environmental analysis based on genetically engineered components, depending on whether or not what you've done is produce something that could have been made through ordinary hybridization. You know, the stuff that we've been doing since caveman era. So I'm not trying to make it— I'm not trying to resist answering the question, but it's a hard question to answer succinctly.
John Markoff: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I found one of the most intriguing things about your talk was the way you set up the framing at the beginning, talking about the evolution of sort of the popular view of science and going fearing science as a destructive force to fearing science today as a creative force. Could you— I mean, I'm not saying it as well as you did, but you could, could you sort of re-explain that?
Alta Charo: Sure. And by the way, you're saying it just fine. So this was, this was the riskiest part of this presentation because I'm not a historian of science or, um, uh, and not a sociologist, but it was my impression that the dominant kind of view of science and mechanical invention in the 19th century was one of celebration. Yes, it had disruptive effects. Yes, it changed the economy from land management to industry, let's say, in, you know, 19th century England. But by and large, there was a celebration of all the great new things you could do with the steam engine and electricity. As you move into the 20th century, you see science now being put to really large-scale destructive uses. In World War I, you see mustard gas and other kinds of chemical warfare. World War II, of course, introduces us to the power of the atomic bomb. And then we have in the 1970s kind of the era of environmental awareness and the fear of all the chemicals we've been releasing into the environment without appreciating the cumulative effect that they have. So that I see in the 20th century up to at least maybe like the 1980s or so a growing fear of the destructive power of science that's overlaid on what had earlier been a celebration of its inventive potential. Then you begin to see its use in human reproduction, which cuts very close to the bone. I mean, this is something where people really have strong feelings personally, spiritually, something that many people will experience. So it's no longer something far and distant and mysterious. And you begin to see surrogacy and artificial insemination, followed by in vitro fertilization and frozen embryos. And then you begin to see genetic screening and genetic selection of this embryo but not that embryo. At this point, you begin to see a tremendous concern that science is going past some kind of boundary, and you begin to see in a lot of the literature, uh, particularly religious literature This notion that there's a, there's an intrinsic limit to man's appropriate use of power, and after that it really belongs in the hands of— and then fill in depending on your religious beliefs, uh, you know, some kind of deity. And as you move into the 20th century and genetic engineering has gotten more sophisticated, we've now seen scientists synthesize entire chromosomes, create bases for amino acids that never existed before in nature, and might not exist anywhere even in the universe, on another planet for all we know. Um, we find ourselves on the verge of being able to take inorganic materials and manipulate them to the point where you could create a living cell. I mean, we're not there yet. You still have to start with a cell, and then you can replace lots of parts, you can manufacture lots of parts, but this is where it's heading. And at that point, you have now truly put human beings in the place of what, since the ages of the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, would view as the role of the gods, which is the creation of life. And I think that that makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable, not only because it has all kinds of potential problems, because we may disrupt the ecosystem, right, or create something that's dangerous that we didn't anticipate. All those kinds of consequentialist concerns, which make a lot of sense and for which you'd always regulate science. But I think there's a deeper critique here about some things shouldn't be within our power.
John Markoff: There is this debate within the modern environmental community going, well, at least as far back to— probably much farther— but I know it began with the debate between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, the preservationist and the conservationist views of, you know, how to deal with the environment. And, you know, Stewart Brand is an example of someone who's allied with these people who are called eco-pragmatists or eco-modernists. You know, Stewart's rallying cry in the opening pages of the Whole Earth Catalog was, "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it," which of course you've you've talked about. But you also, I mean, you know, if we, if we set aside the religious issues and we talk about just ethical and, and, and moral approaches to this question, um, it also seems that you've talked about the democratization of this technology, which means that it's going to be within the reach of everyone, which to me means that the genie is kind of out of the bottle.
Alta Charo: Yeah, that's true to some extent. I mean, it's, it, one of the things about CRISPR genome editing that is really quite fascinating is that it makes genetic engineering much easier to do with less sophisticated equipment and with less training and less sophisticated laboratory. So in that sense, it's like when YouTube made it possible for everybody to be a movie maker. You didn't need Hollywood, right? It transforms things quite fundamentally and creates new opportunities. And just like with YouTube, it also creates the opportunities for lots of mischief and bad work. But that said, there's a lot of things people can't do without sophisticated equipment, even using CRISPR. And there's a lot of ways in which our environment and our bodies are actually quite resilient when faced with one isolated novel intervention of some sort. So most mutations turn out not to be viable, and they don't last. Either they don't reproduce or they are outcompeted by the prevalent species forms that are already out there. Our bodies, fortunately, have a kind of homeostasis that allows us to revert to a healthy status even after we've had all kinds of invaders and intruders. As we're seeing now. Not always, sadly, but most people recover from these things. So we have to be very much aware of the challenge of regulating here because it is, it is hard to regulate a decentralized phenomenon. It's harder to regulate the runoff from a million front lawns into lakes, but easier to regulate the discharge from a single factory into a river. So it is a regulatory challenge, but we also have to make sure that we don't assume that the risks are more widespread or more serious than they actually are. It's a delicate balance.
John Markoff: My favorite hypothetical that I always sort of play with, you know, there is no firm scientific understanding of whether there's a genetic basis to intelligence. I think it's safe to say at this point.
Alta Charo: Sure.
John Markoff: But maybe as we go down the path, there will be, and maybe there's some complex mosaic of genes that could affect intelligence. And then with CRISPR, maybe it would be possible to offer a service where you could increase your child's intelligence for a small fee.
Alta Charo: Yeah, this is the kind of ultimate designer baby concern. And there's a lot of reasons to think that's not gonna happen. But I mean, I can't predict what's gonna happen 250 years from now, but I can certainly say there's a lot of reasons why it won't happen within the lifetime lifetime of those people listening to this podcast. First, we can't define intelligence. It obviously consists of many discrete phenomena ranging from memory to processing to synthesizing to creativity, and we don't even know how to define most of those terms. So what is it that you're planning to change depends on one knowing what you need to change, and we can't figure out what we need to change. That's the first really difficult thing. The second is that it's almost impossible to make one change without changing other things as well. We live in a, in a context, right? So whatever gene it is allows me to speak quickly without stuttering is living within the context of a whole lot of other genes that are functioning, things that control the muscles in my face but also control my emotions and whether or not they get in the way of trying to speak, let's say, in a public setting. And that's just the beginning of this. The other thing is that I think people imagine that somehow our brains are the only locus of our kind of character and our intelligence. We're learning more and more now about the microbiome and the way in which all of the myriad organisms that live within us are affecting how everything else is functioning. So that I might have the same genes as you, but because we have eaten a different diet since we were born, born, we express those genes differently. And that's not even taking into account then where we're living or, or whether we're exercising. So all of that makes it hard to do. Then add to this, if you want to make a change in your children, you have to do IVF so that you can have the embryo outside the body. IVF is uncomfortable and it has its own risks, so most people don't want to do it unless they really have to, uh, they're trying to avoid something devastating. Or they're trying to get around infertility. Second, as soon as you begin manipulating things, you introduce the possibility of introducing errors. So now you gotta ask, how much do I care about this? 'Cause I might actually wind up harming the child in some other way. Then you gotta ask, how many people are gonna do it? Because really, until you actually have a lot of people doing something, it hardly matters. I mean, you need a, a large number. Uh, you're not gonna get genetic case systems, um, until you've got millions and millions or even a billion people who have been doing something. This is not terribly realistic. And we also know that most people don't want to do this because they could have been getting superior sperm all these years when they go to sperm banks, but mostly they just want somebody who looks like whoever they married, you know, however imperfect that person is. So we've got lots of reasons to think this isn't really going to happen. Finally, Even doing it with embryos, not gonna work, because when you'd make the change in an embryo, you may change some cells but not every one of the cells. The only way to be sure you make the change everywhere is to edit either the sperm or the egg. But the only way to make sure that every sperm and every egg has been edited means you've got to actually grow sperm and egg. And you can do that now.
John Markoff: We're work—
Alta Charo: people are working on this by taking, let's say, a cell from your skin and reverting it back to like stage zero and then re- differentiating it into a sperm or an egg, but that introduces a whole host of other risks. So you probably don't want to do that. So I appreciate the concern, but if people are really worried about disproportionate advantage to some classes of people and not others, then it is not going to be through genetic engineering that the problem is going to arise. It's going to arise from superior nutrition, superior, uh, physical environment, uh, access to parents or near relatives who can give Give them extra training, vitamin supplements, you name it, but all of those things make an enormous difference. But genetic engineering, I don't think is going to— I think it pales in comparison to those effects. Sorry, that was a personal rant of mine.
John Markoff: No, no, it's perfect. And let me jump from sort of futuristic stuff to very practical and today questions. And have you been following the regulatory issues around Oxitec and their plan to introduce mosquitoes, a genetically engineered mosquito population to control mosquitoes.
Alta Charo: Yes. So with Oxitec, what they've proposed is to genetically engineer mosquitoes so that they're less likely to carry certain kinds of human diseases. And they were going to do this by something called a gene drive. It's a way of manipulating the animal so that when it reproduces, the genes that you want to have in the next generation have some kind of advantage over the original genes, and so you get very quickly a population that now almost completely shows the genetic change you want. Only works for insects, by the way, because people reproduce too slowly for something like a gene drive. But for insects with a rapid turnover of reproductive cycles, it can work. Um, it engendered a tremendous amount of hostility, some of it from people who really didn't understand the significance. I mean, I remember hearing people say they worried that if they were bitten by an engineered mosquito that it would engineer them too, which really made no sense scientifically, but I understand where the— I mean, I understand where the instinct comes from. Other people had, I think, more sensible kinds of concerns about whether this would affect mosquito populations overall. Mosquitoes are a food source for other species. Does this affect other species? And in a way, can we control this? What if it turns out there really is a problem that we didn't predict? And you know, it turns out mosquitoes have a fairly limited range. So one thing that's very helpful is that they don't really fly that far. Okay, but that said, it's still possible that they might fly into an airplane that's traveling to Australia, and now you've crossed the water. But you'd need to have a lot before that could— before that would make an effect there, as opposed to being swamped by the native population. You also can create, as I was saying earlier, you can also create systems by which you can stop the gene drive. So you can make a change in the mosquito population that has a gene that prevents this disease from being transmitted, but only when in the presence of a certain kind of nutrient. And then you spray the area with that nutrient. So all the mosquitoes that have been engineered are now exposed to it, the gene is activated, and they're unable to pass on a disease. If you don't like the results, you stop spraying the nutrient, and the mosquitoes, even if engineered, can't do anything with it. Um, or you have a change in the daisy chain that basically has a limited lifespan, so that the gene drive works, it increases the population of engineered mosquitoes, and then it decreases on its own. Um, again, these are the kinds of mitigation methods methods that are being developed by scientists around the world and in the Safe Genes Project for the Department of Defense. And it's those kinds of things that make these experiments more feasible when you think about the benefit of being able to limit the spread of things like dengue fever, or think back a couple of years, the Zika virus, which was causing these devastating birth defects when pregnant women were infected.
John Markoff: Let me ask you about the, the The scientist in China who did try to tamper with the germline, what's come out of that in terms of what might happen with international treaties or laws? Has it had an impact on the international debate about these technologies?
Alta Charo: Ah, yes, He Jiankui.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Alta Charo: Such an interesting character. You know, I had dinner with him the night before he gave that presentation because I was on the organizing committee for the meeting in Hong Kong. And, um, we had word about 24 hours in advance about what was going to happen, and we had a long time to discuss whether we wanted to give him a platform at all, but decided it was best to actually get this information out there so that people could all discuss it. And I want to start by saying that I think he really is an unusual, but not necessarily unique, kind of character in these stories. He seems to have been driven by an interesting combination of a genuine desire to do something to help with the problem of HIV infection and AIDS, which has got a pretty high prevalence in the province he comes from. He also has tremendous ambition and in some ways, I think, has an unrealistic notion of himself. Kept comparing himself to to Edwards, who was basically the father of in vitro fertilization, wanted to be thought of as kind of the father of germline editing. And finally, what he did when he edited these embryos did not actually achieve the edits he intended. For one thing, not all cells were edited. I, uh, as I mentioned, if you edit an embryo, you may find that the gene is edited properly in some cells and not others. And the result is that you wind up with what we call a mosaic. By the way, many of us are natural mosaics and don't even realize it. And it's not necessarily dangerous, but it's also not something that you really want to have happen without, you know, intentionally. So it's unclear in some ways exactly how we managed to pull this off. The Chinese investigation has not yielded much public information, but from what we can tell, it did involve multiple hospitals and IVF clinics. Um, it's not clear how much each of those entities knew about what he was doing. It's possible an IVF clinic thinks he's just making embryos, doesn't know he's editing them, and, um, that the people handling the pregnancy don't realize it's an edited embryo, and etc., etc. There's also a question about whether or not the hospitals understood what he was doing. And there's also, from my mind, from having looked at the the documents, pretty clear that the people who agreed didn't really appreciate what they were doing. They weren't given the kind of information that they needed, and that they may have been simply unduly enticed by the prospect of having IVF offered to them for free, because it's wildly expensive in China. So agreeing to be involved in this gave them an avenue. So you asked, what's the consequence? One is that in China itself, there's now some interest in going back and looking at the entire system for oversight of research in order to make sure that it is comprehensive, comprehensible, um, and also uniformly applied throughout the country. All three of those things are still a challenge in China, which has thousands of local research oversight boards of wildly varying degrees of sophistication and a very confusing set of laws, guidelines, regulations. It's quite a mix. On the international level, it led to two committees being formed. You know, I worked as the co-chair with Richard Hynes from MIT on leading the National Academy study on genome editing, came out with recommendations about how to manage it from a regulatory point of view here and abroad. But it was in broad strokes. So as a follow-on now, An international commission has been created made up of representatives from national academies around the world to ask the following question: if there was ever a reason good enough to try to do germline editing— and we don't know necessarily that such a reason will occur— but if there is a reason to do it, what would you need to know in advance? What experiments would you need to have done in advance to know how to do it safely enough? So they're working on that. That is kind of a regulatory roadmap, not to say you must do germline editing, but if you ever do, don't do it unless you've had all of this preclinical stuff done. Second committee, and I'm on the second committee, is at the World Health Organization. And the goal there is to come up with a framework for governance, not only of this germline heritable kind of editing, but also of all the applications, including things like trying to make yourself stronger. So-called enhancement applications, or editing fetuses in utero, or— we haven't even touched on this— epigenetic editing, that is, editing the things that control whether genes will express themselves a lot or a little, right? Kind of like the pedals on the piano, right? All of which are subject to some kind of regulation, but many countries don't have a framework yet that can adequately address all these applications.
Narrator: Is this focused mostly on human germline, or is this for all germlines, any organism?
Alta Charo: The two commissions are entirely focused on human application only, not agricultural application, so not plants, not animals, and not any other substance because there's some interesting possibilities for growing concrete. It's wild, the things that you can imagine doing. But that's not within our purview.
John Markoff: So there's another component I'd love to get your thoughts on. We also have moved from this era when there was a bright line between the academy and the corporate world. And now culturally, particularly at places like Stanford, really the blurring of the line is celebrated. Every professor I know in the CS department or the electrical engineering department or graduate student are on their way to starting their company if they haven't started their company already, and it's really changed the nature of both science and engineering fundamentally, I think. Do you have a perspective?
Alta Charo: Yeah, I do. I think that it is neither a good thing or a bad thing, it's simply a transformative thing. It certainly has helped to move basic research into potential areas of application much more quickly, and it has allowed for partnerships with people who really understand markets and the cost of complying with regulatory systems, so that you can have a kind of refocus on those things that may have in the short term more of an impact on the quality of human life. So those are all good things. Bad things are the way in which it changes the competitive nature of science, which was already plenty competitive just based on ego and reputation. Because now you have intellectual property at issue, and that's caused all kinds of issues for the universities and how they deal with one another. I think there's something even deeper though. Starting with the Bayh-Dole Act, after Senator Bayh and Senator Dole, the Bayh-Dole Act in the 1980s made it possible for universities to retain, and their scientists to retain, the patent rights to inventions, even if those were made using federal money, like National Institutes of Health, NIH grants. Historically, scientists and doctors, they were kind of viewed as being the good people. They didn't have a conflict of interest. They were only there to help. The scientists were there for pure discovery. The doctors were there to help me. So when they said things, they were heard without skepticism. I'm not talking about the snake oil salesmen. I'm talking more recently than that. You know, once there is now this conflation of business and science and business and medicine, you have people wondering when they hear things about what the motivation is for saying it. And I think it has harmed the reputation of the scientific and medical communities writ large in terms of their ability to have the public see them as only having the public's interests at heart.
John Markoff: Do you think we're at the point, you know, I think you've pointed to Asilomar and particularly the conference that I think it was '71 or '72 that basically paused genetic engineering very early on. Are we at the point where that kind of gathering of the, you know, all the best minds would, is that the way to approach these things?
Alta Charo: It's part of the way to approach these things. I mean, Asilomar was a very small gathering at a time when you're dealing with science that was done by a fairly limited number of people because it needed this very sophisticated labs and training to be able to do it. And I think today we're dealing with something fundamentally different in biology, let alone in AI, where you have an enormous number of people who are working and you also tend to have a culture that's much more kind of independent and autonomous than the biology community ever was at that time. I mean, the kind of ethos of the hacker is not comfortable with this idea of an asylomar kind of agreement. That said, there are all kinds of groups that have self-organized to try to come up with a code of ethics for computing, for artificial intelligence, for privacy regimes, for security measures, and And I do have some hope that because they all do look to one another and read one another's work, that there may be a kind of coalescing around some basic principles over time.
John Markoff: So thank you very much, Alta. This was great. I have another hour's worth of questions, but maybe there'll be a part 2 sometime.
Alta Charo: Thanks very much. No, it's a pleasure. It really was. All right. Stay well, guys. Stay hunkered and healthy.
Narrator: That was R. Alta Charo in conversation with John Markoff. If you're interested in this topic, and if you've come this far, I'm sure you might be, be sure to check out the notes for this episode. We've got some interesting links, including to a documentary that Alta recommends and happens to be featured in called Human Nature. Human Centered is a show from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. To learn more about the people and projects at the center, visit our website by going to casbs.stanford.edu or follow us on Twitter @casbsstanford. Special thanks to CASBS Information Manager Jason Gonzalez for today's opening. From everyone at CASBS, thanks for listening.